My Little Skoney - Or - Tabu in Scentquestria

by Le Marquis de Carabas

Scentship is Magic

Author's Note:

Hope you enjoy this story! and if you want more comments and thumbs are so appreciated

A take on what skonies (Skunk-ponies) look like if that helps one to imagine them as they're reading, along with what we approximate Tabu to look like Art by Bouncybrownbear.

“Most peculiar…” the zebra muttered as he wandered back and forth around a glowing pool of mana in front of him. It currently illustrated the world if it was flat and viewed from above, Zebrican inscriptions floated above various regions.

Tabu shook his dreadlocks from his eyes, a single ring on one of the thicker ones clinking lightly off the golden rims of his glasses. The noise distracted him for a moment, and he shuffled his shoulders, readjusting a poncho done up in red and gold Zebrican designs.

“It can’t be…” he murmured, pacing about. “But If I’m in pacing stages, it must be…” He glanced to a particular shelf on the literal wall of books that surrounded him at all corners. This particular shelf contained his journals on strange multi-dimensional phenomena. This was not unusual in Equestria, simply rare and highly localized. One could find any number of extra-dimensional rejects had fallen down the plug hole of their reality into the pastel world Tabu occupied, but no…one in particular had caught his interest.

A showman researched Biology, or claimed to, all of it at once, and they never got anywhere outside being a mildly pleasant conversationalist. A researcher specified. If he’d wanted to find any extra-dimensional immigrant, he could have done it on an odd Wednesday with a packed lunch. No…he wanted specifics.

One of the journals smelt vaguely of sage.
Tabu blushed at the memory.
There were newsclippings in a lot of the journals, stories of ponies who had run into
creatures with claws on their forehooves, who stood a head higher than any pony they had ever met, with…enormous scented tails.

The table beeped the beep it beeped when Tabu’s mind wandered. He brought it back to the problem at hand. Or…perhaps problem wouldn’t have been the right word. The serendipity at hand.

Tabu turned his mind towards a hat on the nearby rack and a glowing golden choker joined a bowler cap floating jauntily onto his head and around his neck, and he raced out of the door.

“There’s absolutely no way…”

“Mornin’ Ta-” before his neighbor, Unzingweh, could get the last syllable out the zebra had already passed him, the rings on his dreadlocked tail shining in the winter light. “Bu…”

I’ll have to apologize to him later… Tabu thought internally. That is…if I can get ‘There and Back Again…’ The title of a book fallen through some random hole in the universe and, unfortunately, into a puddle, came to mind.

Tabu ran as far and as fast as he had ever run in his natural born life, ignoring neighbors, social workers, and frightening more than one foal. He wasn’t sure how long he ran for, or when he had decided to gallop up a mountain but he strained forwards now, racing towards its peak at high speed, the runner’s-haze clearing from his awareness as he realized that, yes, there was a shimmer in the air there, beyond the precipice…but…

It was up, not straight; he’d have to jump and he was running far too fast to stop now. Several calculations ran behind his eyes, an attempt to stop would mean a high fall. His choker could probably soften it but he’d definitely break a bone, probably a hind leg, it would make sense to fall backwards, but-

No time.

“Okay then, I guess this is where my day is going…” Tabu braced at the edge of the cliff and leapt with as much power as his legs could grant him.

It was more of a loan, and on bad credit. The life of a scholar is unkind in the realms of physicality.

But the shimmer got closer. The triumphant yell Tabu let out turned into more of a hopeful whinny as the air whistled around him.

----

Elsewhere

----

“Girls, stop arguing…” came a voice tinged with a bit of nasal bookworm onto a field of flowers in the shadow of a crystalline castle.

“Tell HER to apologize!” another voice broke the ambiance, this one jagged with repute, while somehow also being full of cotton candy.

The sound of fluttering wings. “Why?” A sandpapery brashness slipped into the glen. “I calls’em as I sees’em Stinky Pie!”

The reproach the cotton-candy voice managed to put into a single gasp was admirable.

“COME DOWN HERE MINTY DASH, I’ll make you smell of me till twice Sunday, and we’ll see what compliments you get!”

“Why would I come down there after you said that?” an audible shrug.

“Tarnation, will you two knock it off?”

“You should apologize, Minty…” the newest voice was a strain to hear.

“I concur…” a lace tablecloth of a tone fluttered over the conversation. “To insult another’s scent is tantamount to a slap!- Oh…did I damage a claw?”

“Naw, you’re good, how long do I gotta paint these for, berrybush?”

“Until the second coat’s done at least!”

Finally, the scene settled, but not as one might expect it. Within the glen, were almost-ponies. The purplest of these stood to her full height, twitching a pink-ish nose above a book she left in a nest of flowers.

Her small, but sharp, foreclaws disturbed the grass as she shook out her haunches. Regular, smooth pony hind-hooves lightly shuffled the ground, revealing a cream-colored underbelly as a massive purple-mauve banner of a tail expressed its volume around a shockingly large core beneath. Her brow creased in a frown below a glimmering purple jewel where a unicorn might have a horn. “Alright, that’s enough, I’m never going to get through this interdimensional travel report from the Ibex kingdom at this rate.”

“Jasmine?” an eloquent voice politely chimed in to the purple skoney.

A similar hybrid with luscious white fur and a beautiful deep purple mane of hair falling over one eye, slightly obscuring a blue gem of her own, looked up from where her orange and yellow counterpart attempted to hold a tiny claw-brush between two clumsy foreclaws.

“Yes, Lavender?” Jasmine Rose turned her attention away from the hill where Minty Dash and Pinkie Pie were having a go. The cyan mephequine flapped in circles above the pink puffball beneath her, occasionally dodging where her lightning-rainbow-striped mattress of a tail threatened to buffet her.

“Do you think we should just let them tire each other out? They’ll wander far enough away that we won’t hear them in a moment, and by the time they wander back, they’ll have forgotten what they were fighting about. What do you think, Cattleya?”

The orange Skoney almost dropped the claw-brush in surprise at being addressed. “Wazzatnow?”

“The fight?” Jasmine raised a brow. “You just said insulting Pinkie’s scent was like slapping her, remember?”

“Well yeah, but I’m distracted! Anyway they’re grown skoneys, it shouldn’t be our job to figure it out. If Minty ends up smellin’ like juniper and cake till Christmas it’s her own fault.”

“Well…” a soft voice chimed in as the fourth witness to the display lifted a butter colored foreclaw. “I do think we should intervene…I can’t imagine not smelling of myself for that long, Pinkie’s scent is lovely, but that’s quite the punishment still…”

Jasmine sighed. “Gingershy is right…we should probably break them up.”

Two of them stood, a gentle violet riot of a tail standing at a gentle fold of attention next to a pastel butter-pink plume.

Jasmine and Gingershy turned to look at the pair still sitting.

“What?” asked Lavender earnestly. “The second coat is the most important one!”

“Can’t argue with her…” said Cattleya, not looking up. “She’s right.”

Jasmine’s tail frizzed in slight annoyance as Gingershy chuckled into a foreclaw.

The pair of friends turned to stop their compatriots from buffeting each other into an olfactory riot right when a white disk dilated into existence about thirty feet in the air.

“What in tarnation!” Cattleya’s exclamation bowled over Lavender’s cry of dismay as she got a bit of purple polish on her pristine white fur.

Jasmine and Gingershy leaped to either side as something came screaming out of the glowing void to fall between them with a surprisingly anti-climatic ‘Flumph’ a glowing halo of magic under the quadrupedal body to thank for the lack of a splat or a crack.

A gold necklace around the striped creature’s neck ceased glowing as it fell the last inch to the ground with an ‘Ooof’.

“W-what is it!?” Gingershy somehow managed to make an exclamation point quiet as she hid, mostly concealed, under Jasmine’s drape of a tail.

The purple Skoney looked back at her with slight reproach. “My tail is not a hiding place, Ginger…” She turned her gaze back towards the fallen thing as it got up on its legs. “As for what?”
It was…

Small.

Of the assembled skonies, Minty Dash was the shortest, clocking in at 6’9. Jasmine’s Skalicorn 7’5 absolutely dwarfed the tiny thing. Gingershy herself could have picked it up like a large dog by its scruff at 7’ even.

“I don’t know…”

The thing coughed before croaking, “W-what? D-did I…did I actually…”

“Oh it speaks sense…” Cattleya nodded approvingly. She shuffled forwards, discarding the claw polish, the small striped thing leaned back as she leaned forwards, eyes getting wide as the 7’2 skunk hybrid sniffed at his 4’11 frame. He was tall in Zebrica…quite tall…almost spindly. “Hey there little…” She darted her gaze down and the creature clenched its, no, his thighs. “Feller. Where’d you come from?”

“I…aayyyyyeee uh….” The striped equine’s chest rose and fell as though he were trying to self inflate. “I think I need…uh.”

“THE STRIPES darlings!” Before anyone could stop her Lavender encircled the tiny creature in a circle of her 6’8 body. The creature became very aware that this approximation was from paws to snout, and did not include the massive alabaster and violet cloud that ringed him to her searching eyes. “So many! I’ve never seen a creature with this many! They’re GORGEOUS!”

The equine yelped as Lavender’s tail boofed into his back, the voluminous fluff threatened to swallow him like a poofy liquid as it pulled him towards her. She sat on her haunches and the small thing almost vanished between the fluff of her tail and the plush of her stomach. Somehow, every sense was assaulted with the scent of lavender. There were muffled noises. What little could be seen of his ears were pink. Purple painted claws delved into the marshmallow miasma to retrieve him, then hug him to her chest while her eyes scanned over his form. “Your COAT darling…” She pet at him like a dog. “It's MARVELOUS simply MARVELOUS, I must know your name and you must let me study your design!”

“Uh…Lavender?” Jasmine gently broke into the scene.

Lavender’s eyes cleared as though she’d forgotten where she was. “Oh…” she turned to Jasmine, smiling. “Yes, Darling?”

“I don’t think he can breathe…”

Lavender blinked, before turning to see that the fluffy poof of her chest was submerging the striped equine, whilst her tail had risen up to support his haunches in cashmere fluff. The warm center of the appendage perhaps getting more familiar than was polite.

“Oh…” she pulled him backwards and sat him on the ground. Her fluffy wall of a tail retreated behind her in a prim fold, her stripes a diamond patterned in purple ribboning up in twin trails in a sea of precious white. “Sorry darling…You know how a girl gets…Um…you were about to explain?”

“Izapardongonnafalldownnow.”

There was far more satisfying thud than the first as the creature hit the ground.

“Oh dear…” said Gingershy, peeking out from Jasmine’s tail.

Lavender was thrown to the side as Pinkie Pie raced past, almost trampling the fallen equine as Minty Dash’s voluminous tail trailed behind her backstroking flaps, catching the air and scenting it cold and crisp. She halted to a shockingly sudden stop as she noticed what was going on. “What’s that?” she asked, her rainbow bolt stripes frizzing in confusion.

Pinkie continued to yell until she realized no one was looking at her, she then looked where they were all looking to fit in. One could hear ticking in her head before a small alarm went off.

She shot forwards and bundled up the fainted equine in claws and tail and squeezed haunch alike, as though trying to bury him against her tummy.

Pinkie grinned up at the slightly concerned looking assembled skoneys, before she made a loud, happy declaration.

“NEW FRIEND!”

Comments

[OP Omni God-Emperor Doom]

So they are now giant skunks? Cute!

And thank goodness that it isn't a frickin fart fetish!

Skunks can be very cute, without their main defense trigger.

[Le Marquis de Carabas]

11480142

Thanks! Yeah, skunks are so cute, and while I don't kink shame, I think cuter takes on them in fiction are a nice change of pace!

Also, feel free to give a thumbs up! HA this story is starting in the red for some reason.