The Crew of the Ardhanarishvara

Ah, the Ardhanarishvara, that great beast of science. The crown jewel of the Interstellar Exploration Society’s research fleet, responsible for the discovery of seven new forms of alien life, a town of two thousand drifting among the stars — and crewed, almost entirely, by lecherous anthropomorphic animals.

In late 2025, i was infected with a particularly acute case of Horny Brainworms while on a walk, and decided to set my creative talents to the highest purpose i could think of: incredibly niche furry smut. Unfortunately for me, as the project ballooned to novella-length, i grew quite attached to the characters and world i had come up with — too attached to just leave them there in NSFW purgatory forever! So here’s a page all about the silly buggers.

About Castor

“It’s like I said, babe: nothing but ab-so-lute trash.”

Castor Bobrski never asked for any of this. He only took a place on the Ar­dha­na­rish­vara because he was sick to death of his old job as the only engineer on an Aldrin cycler full of loutish tourists — why not put his talents to use for the greater good? Unfortunately for him, the universe had other plans.

The beavertaur’s official title is “engineer”. This has always been a slight misnomer — his job is more akin to that of a mechanic or electrician, running around the ship and fixing other people’s messes, but it’s space­faring tradition, and if anyone were ever to change it (a) the country would be done for and (b) we’d lose our supply of credulous young graduates with engineering degrees.

Physical

Castor is a perfectly ordinary anthropomorphic beaver, as long as you under no circumstances look at any part of him beneath the neck. Either of them. Ten minutes before the Ardhanarishvara set off through a wormhole to Eta Geminorum, he found himself trapped in a part of the ship with no shielding, wreaking havoc on his body, to which an ill-advised injection of medical nanobots didn’t help.

As Polly would put it, Castor has “two of everything”. His broad body plan is centaurine in form, carried by four thundering legs; at the back, two long and flat beaver tails jut out as if fighting for space. On his front half, he has four arms, one pair stacked on top of another, with bushy armpits under each shoulder. His padded hands also each have an extra thumb mirrored on each side, giving him twenty-four fingers in total — a boon to his ability as a mechanic, if nothing else. (He wears a matte-black engineer’s ring on his lower left ring finger.)

The most obviously strange thing about him, however, is that he has two heads; each is practically identical except that the shade of green in his eyes is slightly warmer on his right than on his left. Despite that, he is just one guy in there, though in moments of intense emotion his train of thought often diverges into two streams.

Social

There are three true loves in Castor’s life: slacking off, bad movies, and Polly.

Slacking off. It is, in some sense, his laziness which makes him a truly talented engineer. He would really rather be spending his time bumming around, and as such, he is highly motivated to find effective fixes to problems as quickly as possible, usually involving an inhumane quantity of duct tape. His colleague and old friend Beuce acts as the angel on his shoulder in these scenarios, guiding him to a more conventional solution; whether he’ll accept that solution is a different matter.

Bad movies. As far as Castor is concerned, worse is better, and anyone who gets close to him will be rapidly acquainted with the flash drive, a collection of some twenty-thousand B-movies originally given to him by a raccoon friend in college. Horror in particular is a highlight — there’s nothing better than kicking back after a long day debugging a broken sprinkler system to watch the fakest blood and guts this side of the asteroid belt.

Polly. The odd couple began a (shall we say) non-Hipaa-compliant relationship back when he was recovering from his wormhole accident and she he was treating him in medbay. The two of them have since become an inseparable duo, and she can often be seen riding on his back around the ship.

About Polly

“My mama always used to tell me… Aletheia, most people are mostly nice most of the time — and damn the ones who aren’t!”

Aletheia “Polly” Polydefkis is, by all accounts, one of the most talented astrogeneticists in Europe. There’s a picture in her bunk of her smiling giddily while holding a Petri dish on the front page of Nature and everything. But most people on board assume the “Doctor” in her name stands for M.D. — and why wouldn’t they?

It’s a rare event when the Ar­dha­na­rish­vara actually finds something new, so most scientists on board have a second job to work, and her jury duty is treating patients down in medbay. Still, she got on this ship to advance the cause of scientific knowledge, and damned if she’s going to leave without having placed at least one more pebble on the shoulders of giants.

Physical

Polly is a svelte, mousy opossum with a smooth coat of body fur coloured the lightest grey, fading into total titanium white on her face. Pier­cing cerulean eyes accent her mop of messy, wavy black hair, through which poke two small brownish-black ears.

Her thin physique still has room for some surprise, such as the pouch on her chest — she wanted to get it pierced back in uni, as a marker of marsupial pride, but the tattoo parlour wouldn’t let her.

Most of the time on board, she’ll be found in the Ardha’s typical blue uniform or lighter medical scrubs; back on Earth, she prefers bold, upbeat-colour tops and mycelium jeans.

Social

To anyone whose only interactions with her are the occasional trip to medbay, Polly comes off as perky, upbeat, and always willing to help. This is about 20% her actual personality and 80% a façade powered by ungodly intake of beverages with enough sugar that they no longer meet the legal definition of “coffee”.

In private, she retains that same sunny, optimistic outlook, but with a snarkier edge (though she’s more likely to fall asleep on her keyboard than outright snap). Her supervisor, the human Dr Adam Koposov, can attest that there is nothing more piercing than an insult from an opossum who wanted to be in bed five hours ago. Other than a lancet. Probably.

She met her boyfriend, Castor, in a blatantly regulation-flouting relationship in medbay as she was assigned to nurse him back to health. The pair (trio?) have since stuck with each other through thick and thin, and are practically inseparable when not on the clock; on bad-movie nights, they alternate between cheesy rom-coms and failed gory splatter flicks. (She gets scared easily, but that’s part of the fun!)

About Timo

“Yeah, but it gave hir a big dick, too, so, hey. You win some, you lose some.”

Timo Tjokrosutenturuno is just here for the popcorn. Born and raised in a self-sustaining Asean colony on Mars, shi joined the Ar­dha­na­rish­vara with nothing but a passion for computing, a certificate from a community college, and endless bugging from hir extended family a dream. Culture clash aside, it’s turned out pretty well.

The bearcat is part of the Ardha’s small army of IT technicians, with admin responsibility for the sector of the ship including Polly’s office. Good thing, too, because the medical equipment is deathly finicky; the cramped lab is practically a second home, and where shi and Polly spend most of their time together.

Physical

Back on Mars, Timo was the runt of the litter in hir family. On the Ardha? Well — you can’t exactly miss hir. The bearcat measures in at just over two metres in height, dwarfing utterly the rest of the crew, with bushy, dark grey fur that bursts into peppercorn speckles on hir scraggly-whiskered face.

Shi’s fairly paunchy, too, with what the discerning connoisseur might call a Venus-of-Willendorf frame — though, to hir chagrin, “IT specialist” isn’t as sedentary a job as the marketing copy would have you believe.

Hir eyes are shot through with golden hue, accented by jade-green liner, and the tufts of hir ears have a tendency to display what shi’s really thinking at any given moment. As for hir goatee, shi claims shi grew it to ward off “kiasi straight guys who wouldn’t like what they found”.

Timo’s body isn’t all as the heavens made hir, of course. Under ultraviolet light, you’ll find hir fur a veritable canvas of fluorescent dye tattoos: on hir belly, a large pink symbol of Mercury points suggestively downwards, while hir back is painted in lime with the soaring wings of a garuda; below, the dye reads “LASKAR GARUDA MFC — MARS CHAMPIONS ’64”. (Shi doesn’t remember getting that one. Arrack may have been involved.)

Hir uniform is the Ardhanarishvara’s standard-issue Yves Klein blue, and shi usually interfaces with the ship’s computer systems via smart contact lenses, hand gestures, and a keyboard mounted to hir right thigh.

Social

The thing about Martians is that they have no concept of “TMI” whatsoever. This has made Timo a nightmare for HR, but a dream come true for Polly (and, as of late, Castor), to whom shi acts as a kind of unofficial relationship consultant, sexpert, and someone willing to state the obvious but impolite.

Unlike Castor and Polly — the former estranged and the latter just forgetful — Timo keeps in close contact with hir family when out on missions, recording daily video messages to hir half-dozen auncles keeping them up to date with the latest goings-on.

Hir bunk is plastered with loud, psychedelic posters and throwback furniture, including a popcorn machine shi stole from the mess hall and a bright orange hammock shi vastly prefers to the standard-issue futon. Shi shares it with Vyv, who lacked a place to stay after breaking the ship’s database, and who has become something in between a best friend, a romantic partner, and an irremovable pain in the tail.

About Beuce

“Sometimes I wonder how either of us ever got a degree.”

Bucephalus Strathclyde is increasingly certain that he’s the only sane person on the ship. Castor’s best friend since college — he let Cas stay in his dorm after the beaver’s parents kicked him out — he was the one who told him about the job opportunity on the Ardhanarishvara, and the two have been colleagues in Engineering ever since.

About Vyv

“Right. Red means they’re shaggin’, blue means they’re just mates, green means they got beef, and yellow… Yellow’s some other shit, I dunno, it’s not a perfect system.”

Vyvyan Null is, frankly, an enigma. Officially, they’re not even on the crew; this is, depending on who you ask, either an innocent mistake due to their surname glitching out the IT systems, or because they hacked their way on and it’s too late to kick them off.

About Captain Akona

“I need you to tell me: How soon can you get that log-gnawing layabout back on the fucking job?”

Captain Charlotte Akona is overqualified for this job. She fought for America at the Battle of Null Island, in the Exosphere War, and on Juneau Beach. But apparently repeatedly threatening to “rip someone’s tongue out and feed it to my dead mother” over a bad cup of coffee doesn’t endear you to the powers that be. Who knew? So now, she’s stuck helming a civilian ship for seemingly the specific purpose of getting her as far away from Earth as possible. …Somebody should probably tell her it’s a civilian ship.

About Illya

“Engineers or no engineers, you’re here in the pit! So, what can I get for you tonight, druzi?”

Illya Borsuchenko is the founding father of extragalactic planetology. He has a Nobel Prize. There’s an array of space telescopes named after him. So what the hell is he doing as a barkeep in a forgotten corner of a spaceship? …Okay, maybe it was the time he started spouting on about how ancient aliens are real and they were all centaurs. Or how the Face on Mars was blown up by someone who disagreed with his paper. And the worst part? Castor is starting to believe him.