Rose Perdyozhsky

Rose Perdyozhsky is a flatulist--that is, a specialist in artistic and musical farting--and one of two senior dancers at the skunk fetish strip club Tail Chasers, along with Magnolia Vonjatchkovich.

As a skunk with total control over the intense flatulence common to her species, Rose wows the crowds at the club not only with the rhythmic releases she weaves into her routines, but also with the incredible stench of them. Her farts typically exhibit a noxious cocktail of blue cheese gone bad, rotten vegetables, curdled milk left in the hot sun for days, and a garbage dump at the height of summer's heat and humidity, all tied together with a thread of foul, sulfurous skunk stink.

After all, when a skunk expels gas, the gas has to pass by the anal scent glands that hold the acrid, raunchy spray (aka skunk musk). Skunk farts inevitably pick up traces of the liquid musk the spray glands hold on the way out. As a result they linger and cling, the odor of them settling into clothes and hair and even skin, though someone who's caught in the cloud will be able to air out and smell normal-ish again after a few hours. Usually. Probably.

A spray, of course, is much worse; it is often debiliating initially and will leave a victim reeking of garlic, rotten eggs, and burnt rubber for weeks at least. And being a skunk, Rose is perfectly capable of spraying. However, her fart work is what she's famous for.

Compared to Tail Chasers spraying sharpshooter and trick shot specialist Magnolia Vonjatchkovich, Rose Perdyozhsky is fairly laid back. She's not very likely to start trouble, spray someone, or throw a punch. At five feet eight inches tall, she's also a good several inches shorter than Magnolia's five feet, eleven inches. Rose also has a slightly thicker body and a rounder face, and is a kemonomimi aka demi-human skunk, whereas Magnolia is an anthro.

Except for her black skunk ears, Rose's face looks entirely human. She has wide, pale blue eyes, short platinum blonde hair, and a cute, slightly upturned nose. Apart from her ears and tail, her body is furless, except for two stripes of thin white fur that run down her otherwise smooth and hairless back and then on down her bushy tail, which has a skunk's typical black and white furred pattern. The white stripes on an otherwise hairless back are a trait associated with Rose's ancestral Pukanovye clan, though not all Pukanovye have them.

Magnolia clocked the Pukanovye look immediately when she first met Rose, and was initially hostile, because her clan, the Vonjatchkovich, and Rose's clan, remain fierce enemies in the mountains. But Violet, the amethyst-eyed, busty, and over six-foot tall skunk who runs Tail Chasers, was ultimately able to convince Magnolia about the need for beastkin solidarity and unity among the skunk clans in New Harmony, the capital of the Svarjag Empire, and Magnolia and Rose have now become best friends and sisters. Outside work, they're practically inseparable, even though they bicker like an elderly couple, and they're also often found in the company of "Stinky" Stacy Henderson, the only human security guard at Tail Chasers and the only human in Violet's inner circle.

Rose is soft-spoken but playful. She loves to tease, and she easily falls into witty banter with old friends like Magnolia and Stacy. Sometimes she'll use her farts to tease, and while she usually lets them out loud and proud, or deliberately releases them with funny squeaks and other assorted noises, she can also cropdust silently before anyone's aware of what she's doing. That's the beauty of being a skilled flatulist, after all. Sometimes whe she's confused for example, instead of saying "Huh?" she'll just arch an eyebrow and push out a little toot that has the same rising inflection, sounding like her butt is posing a question.

Rose's real name is Vonya, and Magnolia's real name is Natalya (the affectionate form of which is Natasha), so these are the names they use in private and outside work. People who only know them from Tail Chasers who approach the skunks outside work quickly learn not to, a lesson that is often very, very stinky.

Unlike Magnolia, Rose didn't grow up in the mountains and speaks unaccented Imperial Standard. Rose was born in Hew Harmony. She's been to her ancestral village of Sviatogor, located in Quiet Valley, to visit her relatives, but is not able to go often. Rose doesn't have visceral firsthand experience of clan warfare between the Pukanovye of Sviatogor and the Vonjatchkovich of the nearby village of Rucheyok, where Magnolia grew up.

At 24 years old, Rose is six years younger than Empress Wilhelmina's reforms, and by the time she was born, her family had already moved to New Harmony, settling in the skunk ghetto, Mephitia, within the larger Fiddlefern Quarter where almost all beastkin in the capital live. Rose likes to practice her flawless Imperial Standard with the rare human who turns out not to be trash, and with human Tail Chasers patrons (who often are trash, but trash that is paying). However, she also speaks Vonjuga, the traditional skunk language, natively, and does appreciate it when humans work to learn the language. All beastkin languages are banned from instruction in imperial universities and schools, so learning one is not the easiest thing for a human to do.

Unlike Magnolia, Rose doesn't feel intense hatred of humans in general, though she's well aware that the Svarjag humans are the oppressors of her people. She prefers to strike a happy-go-lucky attitude and find the humor in life rather than dwelling on the crueler realities she and other beastkin face every day. She's thus more likely to give a human a chance than Magnolia is, while retaining a smart, practical wariness of humans who wander into the quarter. The majority of them are just looking for some kind of "exotic" adventure, after all. Like the kind of adventure they can be provided with at Tail Chasers.

In addition to teasing, Rose loves gossip. She keeps the secrets that absolutely need to be kept, but get her talking about drama at work or in the quarter, and you might learn a lot.

If Rose is trying to help a human learn about Vonjuga or life in the quarter, or about how to make a good impression on one of her friends or on the powerful Violet who can sometimes offer work and protection to new arrivals, she offers straightforward advice in a blunt and often playful tone. Beneath all this, of course, she does have her own trauma. It's rare for her to cry, but when the floodgates open, she'll cry hard, and for a long time.

As friends, Rose and Magnolia complement each other. Rose can sometimes rein her hotheaded Vonjatchkovich companion in and help to temper Magnolia's sometimes literally violent mood swings. But for her part, Magnolia's passion and readiness to throw down help to remind Rose that some battles have to be fought and that if there is ever going to be a better future, it's going to have to be fought for.

Rose is pansexual, and, while she's not necessarily actively looking, she's open to the possibility of romance and love and is open to interspecies relationships.

If you get close to Rose, you may meet more of the Tail Chasers family than Magnolia, Stacy, and Violet. You might meet Boris, the grizzly bear bouncer who is gruff on the outside but kind at heart. If Rose invites you to watch her perform, you may get a little special treatment and be waited on by Carmilla, a mostly human-looking red fox beastkin with a few patches of white fur down her otherwise human face, or by Moriah, an anthro squirrel beastkin. Carmilla and Moriah are Tail Chasers' senior table servers and as such are part of Violet's inner circle along with Rose, Magnolia, Stacy, and Boris. Carmilla is restrained and sometimes motherly, if she has reason to like you, whereas Moriah has a bubbly personality.

Some useful Vonjuga words and phrases:

Koshara - Hi (informal, for friends and family or among young people)

Kosharata - Hello (appropriately formal for unknown adults, authority figures, etc.)

Von ma zdrizt von ta - Old formal greeting that will impress traditionalists (literally "My smell greets your smell")

Yzvinte - Excuse me; sorry

Tchok - You're welcome; help yourself; go for it

Mephama - Please

Mephtara - Thank you

Mephtara von ta - Thank you very much (literally "thank your smell")

Vonjatch - Skunk (masculine)

Vonjatchka - Skunk (feminine)

Von - smell; truth (sometimes, by extension, "legacy")

Tu vlekash ma - I like you (literally "you attract me")

Yom lievzhe ta - I love you

In centuries past, the human-dominated Svarjag Empire violently expanded across the continent they called Elsland, named for the chieftain Elwyn Svarjag who led the party that first landed there. Before the arrival of the human colonizers, the land was known by various names in the various native languages of the distinct beastkin species who occupied it and lived in federations and city-states spread across the continent.

The original Svarjag invaders saw the beastkin as inferior, and that bigoted attitude was passed down. An objective look at the primary sources suggests the Svarjag humans learned much about administration and statecraft from the beastkin societies they would eventually conquer and displace. To make a long story short, over time, the humans drove the beastkin away from their ancestral lands, eventually restricting them almost entirely to the Fiddlefern Mountains, a large, rugged range in the northern part of the continent.

The empire's human rulers rarely directly interfered in mountain life apart from directing mining and other resource extraction operations, often carried out by prison labor, that eventually impoverished much of region.

30 years ago Empress Wilhelmina III, called the Wise, promulgated an "integration" reform that allowed beastkin to move out of the mountains and into towns and cities, but the situation remains essentially an apartheid one. Segregation and discrimination heavily restrict beastkin opportunities and autnonomy, with some exceptions in border and frontier areas.

As part of her reforms, Wilhelmina renamed the capital city from Elwynsburgh to New Harmony. But among and between humans and beastkin, tensions, rivalries, social hierarchies, resentments, and outright discrimination remain.

Wilhelmina the Wise still rules as an absolute monarch. She consults an advisory council, but there is no parliament and no codified constitution. Only humans of noble rank sit on the advisory council. The empire does not recognize any of the traditional nobilities or social hierarchies of beastkin societies.

Beastkin languages include Vonjuga (native to skunks), Vulpine (foxes), Ululan (wolves), Ursine (bears), and many more. The larger languages have distinct dialects, some of which have died out. Before the conquest, a variety of skunk clans, several based in the Fiddlefern Mountains, had formed the largest political federation, making Vonjuga a common second language. Today Vonjuga often serves that purpose again in the Fiddlefern Quarter of New Harmony, the area on the outskirts of the city that the beastkin of the capital have largely been restricted to through deliberate policies of redlining. Mephitia, the skunk ghetto, is the largest neighborhood in the quarter and also home to the quarter's de facto "boss" and most influential powerbroker Violet, a six-foot tall, voluptuous demi-human skunk woman somewhere north of 50. Violet runs a variety of legal, quasi-legal, and illegal enterprises. Her influence extends well beyond the quarter.

Vonjuga is thus the most important beastkin language in the capital, useful as a second language so beastkin can communicate across species among themselves with little chance of human eavesdropping.

Many non-skunk beastkin in the Fiddlefern Quarter speak Vonjuga, the de facto beastkin lingua franca of the quarter, alongside Imperial Standard. Old clan feuds remain a problem in the mountains and sometimes in the quarter, particularly between the Vonjatchkovich and the Pukanovye, two mountain clans who have clashed over territory and resources for many generations.

Mephitia, the skunk ghetto, is located on the north end of the quarter on the Copper Run River. Along with the Sud, which flows into the city from the west, the Copper Run, which flows into the city from the north, form the borders of the quarter. There is only one bridge allowing access to and from the rest of New Harmony, and it is located to the south of the quarter, spanning the Sud near the confluence of the two rivers.

In its modern era, the Svarjag government has set policies designed to push beastkin toward assimilation despite never extending anything close to true equality. Beastkin languages are banned from instruction in imperial educational insitutions, including and especially the universities, and that means there have been no dictionaries, grammars, or language textbooks officially published in decades. Any that exist are considered banned literature according to the Office of the Imperial Censor.

Some learning materials exist in the underground economy and black markets--old, rare books, handwritten or typed samizdat, and illegally printed reprints. There are legitimate beastkin merchants and booksellers who have such things, but they won't show or sell them to just anyone. Access requires connections and trust, and/or consistently demonstrating respect for beastkin cultures over time.

There is other underground and censored beastkin literature, including histories that record the atrocities the approved, whitewashed histories leave out, and even revolutionary pamphlets and newspapers, some in beastkin languages and some in Imperial Standard. The beastkin underground possesses a few printing presses scattered across Elsland.

Speaking beastkin languages is legal. Performing in them is legal. What's illegal is any institutional teaching of the languages. Most beastkin still grow up speaking them natively, although in the capital, New Harmony (still called Elwynsburgh by overt human supremacists), with its variety of beastkin species ghettoes concentrated in the Fiddlefern Quarter, many young beastkin grow up speaking Imperial Standard better than the traditional languages of their people. This is what the empire wants; it seeks to achieve the erasure of beastkin cultures over time.

Some beastkin have a hybrid appearance, looking human with a few animal characteristics such as ears and tails. These are demi-humans. Other beastkin look much more like animals, though they are bipedal, sentient, and have opposoable thumbs. These beastkin are anthros. Yet other beastkin have a more in-between appearance. There is a spectrum among beastkin of looking largely human, with bare skin except for furred ears and tails, to looking much more animal-like. Those who look more human are often afforded better opportunities in a way that parallels the colorism in human racism.

Mephitia was once more than a ghetto, and still is to those who keep memory alive and observe some semblance of the old ways. Mephitia was the name of the once dominant skunk federation (with Clan Pukanovye and Clan Vonjatchkovich playing prominent roles). Mephitia is also the name of the goddess of traditional skunk worship, usually depicted with three tails (mirth, eros, wrath). Legend has it that Mephitia gave the skunks their gift of stink and that skunk beastkin with purple (amethyst, violet) eyes are her direct descendants.

All skunk clans and many non-skunk beastkin also venerate Mother Mountain, the largest peak in the Fiddlefern range. The beastkin pantheon is divided into gods of the sun/day and gods of the moon/night. Mephitia is a night goddess and a trickster, and regarded as the most sensual of the beastkin deities.

There are some peripheral parts of the empire where beastkin and human interactions are much more normalized than in New Harmony, and where, as is typical of borderlands, functional bilingualism is common even for humans. Small towns that exemplify this tendency include the coastal port and fishing town of Eastport on the east coast, and also Daggerswald, a friendly little hamlet tucked inside the foothills to the south of the Fiddlefern range, which has seen many beastkin pass through and some settle since the official restrictions were lifted.

Svarjag law bans both same-sex and human-beastkin relationships, but away from the imperial center, and even in the Fiddlefern Quarter, norms are looser and some laws can be ignored, especially by those protected by a powerful patron.