Marion Dale

Marion Dale was a renowned scientist, and the mother of Margaret Dale.

Backstory
Marion was born in 2180, during the First Galactic War.

As a young woman, she became recognised as an exceptional scientist. Sabina White describes her as a "pioneer in the development of aNCS technology. Her research helped us to finally begin to understand the biochemical nature of subjective experience."

Marion believed that much of what individual human beings experience is a projection of their own unconscious, and that each one of them lives in a unique world made up of their own psychological contents. She became fascinated by the idea that the subjective world of one rather powerful person could bleed through into the private worlds of others.

Later, she came up with the idea of a "hypothetical projection experiment" which would involve altering the brain of a human test subject to become more receptive to the projections of other people's minds.

Motherhood and Project Triarch
At the age of twenty-one, she gave birth to Margaret Dale, who was conceived through artificial insemination. Her close friend Captain Vance, whom she had met years earlier, was also present at Maggie's birth.

The father, Jeffrey Cole, had died seven years earlier at The Battle of Heaven's Reach. It's unclear whether Marion knew Jeffrey Cole personally, but she would only have been fourteen at the time of his death. She always told Maggie that her father had died in the war, but never went into the specifics of her origin.

By the time the Second Galactic War had begun, she and Captain Vance had already begun to lay the groundwork for the organisation known as Fractus. In 2207, she also founded Project Triarch along with Professor Brandt and Mick Stanton.

Marion could be quite cruel and would often withhold affection from her daughter. She once destroyed Maggie's entire collection of Peppy Photon books, calling them "banal" and "childish." In the summer of 2210, Marion Dale was with her daughter at a research station on Planet Enki when Maggie contracted Hydran fever and nearly died. Marion nursed her back to health.

After Sabina White joined Project Triarch in 2211, she and Marion became involved in a sexual relationship. Sabina claimed that she ended the relationship when she learned more about Marion's questionable morality. Maggie did not meet Sabina during this period, implying that she and her mother must have been separated for a while.

In 2212, however, Maggie underwent surgery at her mother's behest - apparently to remove a brain tumour. In truth, Marion was finally putting her hypothetical projection experiment into action. The following year, she relocated to Latona Station and brought her daughter along with her.

In 2213 or 2214, she was visited by Captain Vance who informed her that conclaves had been established in both of the Sun Systems.

Disappearance
Marion was onboard Latona Station in 2214 when it was attacked by a number of spaceships. She told her daughter Maggie to go and find a place to hide. Maggie was rescued by Starship Quicksilver, captained by Gail Pilgrim. Although Gail believed that Marion had probably perished in the attack, she promised Maggie that she would try and look for her. She eventually became Maggie's legal guardian and enrolled her at the Pilgrim Space Academy.

In 2215, Maggie received a cryptic message from her mother informing her that she was alive and that Maggie was "exactly where she needed to be."

She would later learn that her mother had been responsible for the destruction of Latona Station. She had become increasingly frustrated by the ethical limitations imposed by Mick Stanton and Professor Brandt, and had decided to take Project Triarch into her own hands with a fresh start. Maggie's rescue from the station and subsequent enrollment in the academy had been carefully orchestrated by Marion with the help of one of her agents, Kathy Brown.

Yamaichi City
It turned out that Marion Dale had been hiding out in an enclave on the Forest Moon of Pan Gu. At first, she ran a laboratory named Asteria Enterprises in Yamaichi City. Locals said they often heard screaming coming from the lab, and assumed that the research was of a medical nature. She also enlisted the services of a local corrupt lawman named Agent Pierce.

Marion treated the scientists who worked for her with a singular cruelty. When She became concerned about the relationship between one of her scientists, Bethany, and a local man named Reo. First she sent Pierce to intimidate Reo, and when that didn't work, she decided to relocate the project to Shiryō Island in order to separate the two of them.

Shiryō Island
Maggie arrived on Pan Gu in 2216 looking for her mother, and eventually found her way to the facility on Shiryō Island. Upon their reunion, Marion immediately began subjecting her to cruel experiments in order to test the limits of her abilities, including administering her with a dose of Euphoria. However, it didn't take long for Maggie to develop a mental resistance to her experiments.

Captain Vance arrived at the facility a short while later, having completed his mission with the Elivagar mining fleet. Meanwhile, Maggie tried pleading with her mother to end the experiments, but it was to no avail.

Finally, a rescue team led by Gail Pilgrim landed on the island, and Captain Vance's men confronted them at the entrance to the facility. Gail and one of Maggie's fellow cadets named Diane Romero managed to sneak inside and make their way to the laboratory, where Marion held them both at gunpoint. She attempted to leave with Maggie, and fatally shot Diane when she refused to move out of the way.

After projecting a terrifying vision onto her surroundings, Maggie pursued her mother out of the lab and then pushed her over a steel railing, causing her to fall to her death.

Instead of a burial, Marion's ashes were released out of the airlock of Starship Quicksilver during its return journey to the academy.

Personality
When Maggie experienced a projection of her mother's mind, she said it didn't feel like anyone else's. She said sensed no emotions, but a great deal of raw power. Sabina also describes Marion as having an "emptiness" inside of her, suggesting that she suffered from some form of psychopathy.

Marion herself claimed that she did feel emotions, but simply chose not to let them overwhelm her intelligence. She believed that stagnation was the greatest cruel that humankind could commit against the universe, and there was nothing she wouldn't do in the name of progress.

This mean that she could often be rather cruel and heartless, but would usually convince others to do her dirty work for her - such as Frank, Agent Pierce and Captain Vance.

She was apparently fluent in Japanese.

Appears In

 * Space Pilgrim Academy: Year 1 (in a flashback)
 * Space Pilgrim Academy: Year 2 (in a video message)
 * Space Pilgrim Academy: Year 3 (in a flashback and a video message)
 * Space Pilgrim Academy: Reunion