Maria Matsumoto

Childhood

Maria grew up on Hakanna Colony, but moved to Earth to live with her grandparents when she was five. Her father, Christopher Loving Matsumoto, died when she was two of a heart-attack, had been survived by her mother by only three years. Kunihiko Matsumoto passed away in an industrial accident, leaving her daughter to be raised by her only surviving immediate family – Josh Loving and Tatsuo Matsumoto, Christopher’s parents. Though she was quite young when her mother died, she remembered her, and the loss of both parents profoundly effected the young girl. Her grandparents were extremely caring, however, and they lived in a modern home in Japan on the outskirts of Hokkaido. The environment was confusing for little Maria, who did not speak Japanese, but her grandparents made sure she was in a good school program and saw a child psychologist three times a week to help her acclimate and explore the feelings she possessed about her parents’ deaths.

By the time she turned thirteen, Maria’s interest in the sciences had already displayed itself in a number of club memberships and several advanced classes. She wanted to either become an anthropologist or an astrophysicist, and pursued both interests with absolute conviction. Her mathematics proved to be extremely sound, however, and this natural aptitude (combined with an excellent Federation education) swayed her gently toward an exploration of space.

Academy Years

It was when her girlfriend at the time applied to Starfleet that Maria first considered signing up. Nobody in her family had joined the Fleet, and the prospect intimidated her, but youthful love won the day. She applied, passed the entrance exams, and entered the Academy three weeks after her eighteenth birthday. Her adolescent relationship did not survive beyond a year, but her numerous other relationships, and her studies, kept her occupied. She found that warp theory and starship design fascinated her, and that her childhood practice of art proved transferable to the 3D modeling required for the field.

She graduated after five years, having taken an extra year to complete a specialized engineering course designed to fast-track her career as an engineer aboard starships. After a grand party thrown by her grandparents, Maria left Earth behind for the stars.

Starfleet Career

Maria was assigned to the USS Dartmouth as an engineering officer, and there she stayed for the next five years, slowly building her skills up in the field beneath the watchful eye of Lieutenant Grissford, the Chief of Engineering. In her off hours, she contributed to a Starfleet Engineering project to design a modern nacelle enclosure, and authored seven papers that explored the results of dozens of warp-theory studies over the previous fifty years, highlighting links between them that offered new perspectives on spacial-rupturing due to continuous warp-drive effects. Her diligence and superb work ethic saw her promoted to Lieutenant JG after four years, with the likely prospect of even faster advancement in the years ahead.

She met Allan Alia-Ledgard while attending the Academy and had taken several classes with him, which led to a fiery but short-lived relationship between the two. After Maria graduated, she lost touch with Allan until he contacted her in 2398 and asked her if she wanted a new position: second officer and chief of engineering aboard his new command, a small Raven-class corvette. The position wouldn’t hurt her career, she liked and trusted Allan, and the mission profiles suggested the sort of free time she craved to work on her own projects. And so, she put in her transfer request and joined the USS Mogrus.