DSS Vimana
Dramatis Personae

by Rose LaCroix

Edward "Red Ned" Arrowsmith
A red fox born into a middle class family in Bristol, Ned has never known desperation or danger... except maybe a few close scrapes with the authorities the few times he tried to find a nice chap to settle down with. Deeply conflicted, he fancies himself an Epicurean but his socially-enforced self-denial of his attraction to males forces him to cage himself within the stoic values of Middle Class Britain in the early 20th century.

To make up for his disappointing love life, Ned has put all his energy into his career as a design engineer for Bristol Aircraft and he's a bit of a prodigy. He began his career as an intern, helping re-fit military aircraft for civilian use. By 1930, he was head of engineering at Bristol and by 1937, he was placed in charge of engineering for a joint project with Studebaker to design a spacecraft for an Anglo-American moon mission. His current project at the start of the story is to play a huge role in helping Britain set up a permanent colony on the moon. He is married to his career... though rather lonely at times.

A smart-dressed fellow, he wears immaculate suits, often wearing a trilby hat with a Tyrian purple handkerchief folded into a crisp bishop's miter in his outer jacket pocket. His whiskers are usually waxed into fine points, like a pencil-thin mustache. He still wears a gold and lapis lazuli ring he bought in Egypt while recovering some planes there in 1920. His prized possession is the green and primrose Alvis Speed 25 tourer he drives to work every day.

Col. Albert Enstone
Col. Enstone, an otter, is an RAF officer with the Lunar Expeditionary Force, the first earth creature on the moon, and a real sourpuss. He dislikes Ned, and makes it a point to let the fox know that the Home Office knows about his homosexual tendencies and is watching his every move.

Col. Enstone does it by the book... except when his temper flares and he becomes brash and hot-headed with a cruel streak. He tends to use threats, yelling, and forceful language to intimidate others into carrying out his orders.

More importantly, Col. Enstone is that most ironic of creatures, an otter that doesn't know how to have fun. Nobody on the crew can stand him, least of all Ned.

Tom Ingerholt
Tom is a gray wolf born in Waverly Iowa, but currently living and working in South Bend, Indiana with Studebaker's lunar division. From a working class family, he's calm and collected under pressure and tends to try to be a conciliatory voice, though at times his simplistic worldview clashes with the new and strange things that are revealed to him throughout the story.

As a colleague, he has known Ned for some time and the two have worked together and developed a good rapport. However, Tom- who is very straight for the most part and married to boot- doesn't know about Ned's tendencies at the start of the story.

Tom dresses casually, in light tan slacks pulled fairly high, a light blue button up shirt, and a dark blue tie. Usually in his shirt pocket is a green miniature pencil and a brown leather-bound book with his calendar, expenses, and useful references and conversion tables.

Capt. Robert Hawthorne
A white-tailed stag, Captain Hawthorne became the fourth American on the moon in the summer of 1938. He takes his missions seriously but has other pursuits. He is an amateur military historian, and has studied classical philosophy and ancient history.

Quiet but intense, he is generally friendly and professional but will not hesitate to become aggressive if the mission is jeopardized. He is a firm believer in Teddy Roosevelt's quip that speaking softly and carrying a big stick is the way to lead. Of Roosevelt, a bull moose in this story, Capt. Hawthorne says he "raised the bar for us deerfolk."

Seldom seen out of his US Army uniform except by his neighbors, Capt. Hawthorne trims his antlers for missions, and carries a polished silver set of presentation antlers that screw into silver caps on the stubs of his antlers. This is a military tradition that goes back to medieval times when deerfolk were forced to adopt full helmets rather than the earlier slotted designs made to fit around antlers and still practiced by cervines in militaries around the world.

Lt. Viktoria Aksakova
Lt. Aksakova is about to become the third Soviet citizen on the moon. A hare from Smolensk, she is calm, professional and collected like Capt. Hawhtorne but like Ned, she is at odds with her emotions. Her family died during the Russian Revolution, killed by forces loyal to the czar, and from age 8 she was raised in an orphanage in Moscow. She was trained as a pilot and flew missions to remote parts of Siberia in dangerous conditions before being drafted into the Soviet Air and Space Force. Along the way, a number of her colleagues vanished or ended up dead under the new hard-line Soviet leadership.

Lt. Aksakova tends to remain aloof from everyone as she wrestles with a lifetime of seeing the cruelty of regimes on two ends of the political spectrum, and the suspicions and sexism of many of the westerners she works with in joint missions with the US and Britain. Keeping her distance and not engaging anyone is her defense mechanism. And yet, underneath that aloofness there's a yearning for friendship and trust that she has begun to feel she might never have in her life.

She is also asexual, but not because of trauma; she's simply wired that way and she finds sexual advances from males (an unfortunate part of her job) to be very off-putting, especially since so many males think she "just needs the right guy" and have often gotten hostile with her.

T.I.N.A.
Theriomorphic Interface and Navigational Aid, or T.I.N.A. for short, is a tactile holographic interface for the AI circuits in the Deep Space Ship Vimana, from the Terran colony on planet Goodwell 14a (colloquially known as Enkidu), the last refuge of earth creatures in the year 2606. Usually in the form of a female yellow lab, her role is ostensibly to interact with the crew, assist with missions, monitor crew stress levels and to help ease the inevitable tensions of long confinement in interstellar travel.

Most often, T.I.N.A. is projected wearing a form-fitting outfit of white and blue, identical to the nanosuits issued to most Enkiduan mission crews.

But maybe she is more than that. Can self-aware technology choose the path of evil of its own free will? Perhaps... but you won't know until it's too late.

Godric of Hereford
Godric is a red fox who was born in Wales in 1120. Of Jewish extraction, he converted to Christianity and became a Catholic apologist and Hebraicist in his twenties but quickly got pulled into the escalating war between King Stephen and Empress Matilda. Loyal to Matilda's bid for the crown, he left England for Laon, France in 1153 after her defeat. However, during the later months of 1153, he became gravely ill with the then poorly-understood disease ergotism from bad grain.