Mitsuko Yamato-Windsor (born 405 IE), also known as Princess Consort Mitsuko, was a Navy Special Forces officer and, later, the wife of King Edward I of Bonaparte. Despite her title, she continued to work in security and in combat roles.
Childhood
Mitsuko was born in 405 to a nephew of King Yanuhito of Bonaparte. As such, she grew up in the Tuileries, though her parents attempted to give her as normal a life as possible.
Service in Household Guards and Compact Navy
As a teenager, she enrolled in youth training with the Chrysanthemum Guard, House Yamato’s division of the planetary defense force. At sixteen, her great uncle permitted her to enlist formally in the Guard, where she served two years. During her time, she became an expert in sword work. She transferred to the Sappers, the division under the House of Windsor, who would take the throne after King Yanuhito’s reign.
At 20, she enrolled at Baikonur Academy on Tian, attending for two years and graduating a lieutenant, junior grade. Her experience with the Household Guards, the Navy assigned her to Special Forces. By the age of twenty-four, she had reached the rank of lieutenant.
She frequently went on missions clearing squatters from mining facilities for an Earth corporation. On one such mission aboard the Cygnus, she met Giddeus Modesto, who piloted an Falcon combat shuttle for them. Her team successfully removed the squatters, but the facility, a hollowed-out asteroid, was destroyed.
Mission to Hanar
At the behest of Admiral Eileen Burke, Mitsuko and Modesto transferred to the Challenger for a mission to Hanar, formerly Gilead. They would accompany Athena Jovann, recently appointed special representative of the Metis government. Jovann would meet with Tishla, the First Citizen of the new joint human-Gelt colony on the former Gilead. During the mission, they foiled an assassination attempt on Jovann.
On Hanar, Mitsuko met JT Austin for the first time. Suicide asked her to train JT in sword work and combat skills. Additionally, Modesto would train him as a pilot. In the meantime, they went on a mission to meet with human hold-outs to the new regime. The team was ambushed, and Mitsuko and Modesto had to hide out in the forest. They were intimate for the first time, but ended up arguing when JT and two human fighters located them.
Still, Mitsuko made Modesto give him something of his for the coming invasion of Amargosa to put in a bullet locket. He took her panties, which she found funny. Before launching, Edward Windsor voiced concern about Modesto as his pilot. She reassured him Modesto would do well.
Liberation of Amargosa
Mitsuko and her team flew with JT aboard his Falcon during the invasion of Amargosa. They dropped a platoon of Marines from orbit. However, targeting Riverside for their landing zone, the Falcon crashed in the fusion blast that destroyed the city. They survived and were rescued by Ellie Nardino and her Northern Resistance. As the resistance closed in on Lucius Kray, Mitsuko sent two teams and took JT and Connor Duffy to infiltrate Kray’s rear. They freed Eric Yuwono, taken prisoner by Kray, and gave Davra Andraste a chance to free herself. Surrounded, Kray soon died as sapient lycanths from the resistance ate him alive.
After the battle, Mitsuko learned of the death of Modesto, who attempted to stop a colony transport from firing on Windsor’s Special Forces team.
Post-Liberation
Mitsuko continued with Navy Special Forces for two more years. During this time, she became engaged to Windsor, who wanted a queen or a consort who understood both his royal status and his history as a soldier. By 432, she served aboard the Queen Maria Sophia with both Windsor and JT, the latter her roommate. When King Yanuhito passed on, she had to help retrieve her fiancé from the surface of Mud, a remote and insignificant planet when Windsor and a Gelt garrison fought a token battle. Mechs from Juno took over the Sophie and destroyed another starship. They had to escape the ship, fake their destruction, and cut a deal with the Gelt to get back off the planet. Upon the arrival of Suicide with the Valles Marineris, they retook the Sophie, then traveled to Hanar to fulfill the deal with the Gelt Warriors.
Their trip included a stop on Amargosa on the way back. The public reason given was that Windsor, now King Edward of Bonaparte, needed to recuperate from war wounds at the new Thulian Project. In reality, he and Mitsuko would undergo permanent rejuvenation. Bonapartan monarchs actually feigned death while appearing to age. Yanuhito, now calling himself Yoshi again, would wait for his wife there. However, Windsor’s sister Elizabeth attempted to kill him. Mitsuko, Queen Reiko, JT, and a former insurgent named Boone thwarted the attempt.
After the incident, Mitsuko left the Navy and became Edward’s chief of security.
Mission to Aphrodite
In 434, she foiled another assassination attempt against Edward. Intelligence from Cybercommand led her to pay a visit to Frederick Ansel, founder of the Cubism philosophy. Ansel found the violent actions of the radical faction of his following repugnant and suggested she talk to his greatest disciple: Suicide. Together Mitsuko and Suicide traveled to Aphrodite, where they ran afoul of Gerard Kurz, leader of the radical Cubists. Kurz attempted to kidnap both women, but Suicide remained behind to let Mitsuko escape. Before she slipped away, Kurz showed them a giant mech he intended to use to drive off the protectorate regime in place on the planet and establish his own world.
Picked up by the Valles Marineris and assisted by Edward aboard the CNV Chief Iron Cloud, Mitsuko learned of a possible attempt to steal such mechs from alien ruins on Ares, near the capital Boone's Landing. Mitsuko, Davra Andraste, and Ellie Nardino traveled to the ruins, but were unsuccessful stopping Kurz or rescuing Suicide. The Marineris destroyed the mechs as they burned for Aprhodite, deeper in system from Ares and nearby Tian. Connor Duffy joined her, Davra, and a Special Forces team elevated from Household Guards aboard the Chief Iron Cloud to raid Kurz’s encampment upriver from Aphrodite’s capital, Sanctuary. The raid foiled a plot to spread a corrosive bio-toxin into the ecosystem. The platoon fought mechs and Kray’s followers, freeing Suicide in the process. However, Kurz took Mitsuko prisoner.
She escaped with assistance from to fishers, a couple named Patchi and Keernith Rajanni. She later learned these were the so-called Butchers of Sanctuary, who had coordinated a wave of bombings in Sanctuary in 421. The Rajannis had originally intended to turn her over to one of her subordinates, a man named Sakimoto, believing he would return her to Compact forces. Sakimoto, like Kurz, worked for Juno and had planned to hand Mitsuko over to Jez Salamacis, who would have killed her to harvest her tissue as samples of amortal human. Mitsuko Section 11'd Sakimoto.
With Davra, JT Austin, and Ellie Nardino, along with her surviving team, Suicide, and the Keernith’s, she led one final raid on Mt. Buxanshal, where Kurz hoped to make a last stand with a dirty fission device. Mitsuko disarmed the bomb, killing Kurz in the process, but came out of the battle badly injured.
Marriage to Edward I
During her recuperation, Mitsuko agreed to marry Edward. Their wedding took place on an airship over New Versailles, the capital of Bonaparte, in a Shinto ceremony. All but one of the Children of Amargosa attended. Upon her marriage, she assumed the title of Princess Consort, which would allow her to keep her position as Edward’s head of security. The couple sent doubles to another location and honeymooned without security on Amargosa, using JT's cabin while he himself recuperated on Hanar.
Post-Accession Career
Mitsuko returned to Special Forces to assist Eric Yuwono in a Cybercommand operation against Juno on the non-aligned world of Hosh. They destroyed a mansion used as a lab for bio-weapons and stolen resurrection technology. However, she had to return to Bonaparte after the mission when Parliament complained loudly about the mother of a potential heir put herself in harm’s way.
Personal Life
King Yanuhito: Mitsuko grew up fond of her great-uncle, whose regnal name was Yanuhito in the tradition of House Yamato’s Japanese origins. She called him “Uncle Yoshi,” Yoshi being his birth name. At one point, she vowed before Yanuhito she would never marry a royal, a vow she tried to keep. However, Edward Windsor, Yanuhito’s designated successor, made a compelling case: Both were royal, and both served in Special Forces under combat situations.
In private, Yanuhito called Mitsuko “Mitsu.”
Queen Reiko: Queen Reiko, Mitsuko’s great aunt, doted on her. She arrived aboard the Queen Maria Sophia to notify Edward Windsor of Yanuhito’s passing. A former police officer, she showed quite a bit of skill when the Sophie was taken. She also disabled Elizabeth Windsor when the latter attempted to assassinate her brother on behalf of the radical Cubists.
Giddeus Modesto: Mitsuko and Giddeus Modesto first served aboard the Cygnus together. Because he was frequently reckless and insubordinate, he found himself demoted several times. The pair transferred, after an ill-advised maneuver through Demeter’s atmosphere and subsequent shuttle crash, to the Valles Marineris to travel to Hanar.
The pair began a relationship cut short by Modesto’s death on Amargosa during its liberation. Mitsuko later said it kept her and JT Austin from becoming a couple. Additionally, her grief may have, by her own admission, made it possible for her to accept Edward Windsor’s marriage proposal.
Suicide: Upon her arrival on Hanar, Mitsuko met Suicide when the latter briefed Admirals Austin and Burke, Special Envoy Jovann, and Fleet Admiral Tran at an audience with Tishla. Later, Suicide approached her about training JT Austin in sword work and combat while Modesto trained him as a pilot. Over time, the older woman began to regard Mitsuko as an extension of herself. As a result, during the liberation, Mitsuko was included as one of the Children of Amargosa. The two frequently went on missions together in the ensuing years, with Mitsuko frequently disregarding her royal status.
JT Austin: JT and Mitsuko met at the same audience with Tishla as she and Suicide. Suicide asked her to take him under her wing. Having already trained and trained with Tishla’s nascent militia since his arrival on Hanar, he accompanied the local troops on the Compact mission to mediate with human holdouts to the new Hanar government. The Special Forces team scattered after an ambush. JT found Mitsuko and Modesto in a compromising position the next morning, but let it go once the abducted admirals were recovered.
Suicide told her JT saw her as an older sister. Mitsuko took to the role well. However, during the liberation, the pair survived a crash after a fusion weapon knocked their Falcon from the sky. They recovered enough to participate in the final confrontation with Lucius Kray.
After the liberation, the pair became extremely close to where she offered him a position as her personal pilot if she married Edward Windsor. When JT joined the Navy, Mitsuko insisted on being his roommate. They served together, along with Windsor, on the Queen Maria Sophia. She supported him in Edward’s questionable gambit to have JT seduce his sister on suspicion she might have betrayed him.
JT joined her mission to Aphrodite, primarily to rescue and repair a rift with Suicide, but also because he preferred fighting at her side, even as a reservist or a civilian. He would also arrive on Hosh to assist her when her Household Guard platoon elevated to take part in a Cybercommand operation there.
The pair never got involved romantically. He admitted he knew he was too much like Modesto, and Mitsuko appreciated having a male friend without the complication.
Edward Windsor: Edward Windsor became heir to the throne when his father Arthur died.* He made Mitsuko’s acquaintance when she joined the Sappers briefly before they both joined the Navy. They served together in the Amargosan liberation, Modesto being Windsor’s pilot.
The pair began a relationship at some point between the liberation and 433. An argument during Edward’s retrieval from Mud nearly ended the engagement, but the pair reconciled. Eventually, Mitsuko agreed to marry on the condition she be princess consort instead of queen. In that way, she could remain involved with security, the Household Guards, or the Navy. During Mitsuko’s pursuit of Gerard Kurz following an attempt on the king’s life, Edward reactivated his own commission, retrieved JT Austin and Ellie Nardino, and joined Eileen Burke in neutralizing Kurz. While Mitsuko continued to take missions, sometimes elevating from planetary status to Navy Special Forces, Edward voiced apprehension the woman meant to give him an heir would continue to put herself in harm’s way. He admitted some of this was chaffing at the restrictions put on him as monarch.
Frederick Ansel: Mitsuko first met Ansel during her investigation of a second assassination attempt on Edward. She found Ansel to be a reasonable, self-aware man for a leader of a religion. It was Ansel who revealed Suicide’s Cubist philosophy and revealed Gerard Kurz’s role in the radical offshoot of his movement.
After Kurz died in the operation to stop him, Mitsuko returned to Mt. Buxanshal, where Ansel had resumed his work. While Mitsuko was not a Cubist, Ansel nonetheless considered her a disciple and a friend.
Admiral Eileen Burke: Eileen Burke began using Mitsuko for Special Forces missions in 429 after her exemplary performance retaking a mining asteroid and saving the squatters. She brought Mitsuko, along with Giddeus Modesto, aboard the Valles Marineris to join the mission to Hanar. When Tishla’s intentions and Metis’s acceptance of her regime became clear, Burke then put together the liberation effort, naming Mitsuko one of her Special Forces leaders.
Burke frequently used her and her Household Guard or Special Forces platoons in missions, including retrieving Jayne Best from Walton and retaking the Queen Maria Sophia. When Mitsuko went after radical Cubist leader Gerard Kurz on Aphrodite, Burke returned the favor by putting the Marineris and the Children of Amargosa at her disposal. Mitsuko worked with Burke again on a Cybercommand-led mission to Hosh to shut down a Juno operation there.
Bio Capsule:
Species: Human
Birth Year: 405 IE
Birth Place: New Tokyo Arcology, Bonaparte, Compact
Homeworld: Bonaparte, Compact
Service or Occupation: Bonapartan Household Guards (Chrysanthemum Guard of House Yamato, Sappers of House Windsor)(421-423), Compact Navy Special Forces (423-431), King’s Personal Guard (431-434), Princess Consort of Bonaparte and Royal Chief of Security (434 – )
Family:
Great Uncle: King Yanuhito (Yoshiro Yamato)
Great Aunt: Queen Reiko
Spouse: Edward Windsor, King Edward I of Bonaparte
*Unpublished story. He lamented his family could never put an Albert or an Arthur on the throne since the days they ruled Britain back on Earth.
Appearances:
Beyond Amargosa, Storming Amargosa, Suicide Run, Checkmate, Royal Orders, Another Way to Die