| The Celestial Madonna |
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| Name: | "Mantis" Brandt |
| Gender: | Female |
| Place of Birth: | Vietnam |
| Age: | 29 |
| Aliases: | Mantis |
| Origin: | Altered Human |
| Origin Earth: | 616 |
| Present Location: | New York |
| Occupation: | Celestial Madonna/Psychiatrist |
| Team: | Avengers / Guardians of the Galaxy |
| Alignment: | Lawful Neutral |
| Significant Other(s): | :P |
| Powers and Abilities: | Psychic, Chlorokinesis, Healing, Pyrokinesis |
| Portrayed by: | N/A |
Avenger.
Guardian of the Galaxy.
Celestial Madonna.
Mantis has been — and remains — all three. The heroic sacrifice of her lover brought her to full Avenger status, and she defended Earth against alien threats. Many an adventure honed her skills and gave her a life she never would have dreamed of, in the monastery deep in Vietnam's countryside. Yet it was merely a stepping stone.
In time, she fulfilled the prophecy of her birth by ascending to become the Celestial Madonna, mother to a child destined to inherit the force cosmic. Unimaginably powerful beings hunted her down or interceded to see her delivered safely. Forces conspired against her taking a direct hand in her son's upbringing, however. Turning away from her sorrow, she took to the stars.
An active member of the Guardians under Star-Lord (her version, anyways), Mantis swore herself to the defense of the galaxy against some of those titanic threats. She was well and truly suited to spanning interstellar distances with the Guardians of the Galaxy. Some of her tales sound unimaginable, though, even to one who has lived it.
Then something happened. Words were shared. Visions piled on, too potent to ignore.
Mantis came home.
Mantis' personal life is riddled with premature loss and death, more so than most. Her mother died at birth. Her partner, Swordsman, died to save her life and allow her to fulfill a cosmic prophecy. Her father abandoned her to the safekeeping of monks shortly after her birth, and even those beloved priests mind wiped her to assure her happiness. About the only bright point in her life right now, her son, she gets to see once every few years or only when she astrally projects herself. It's worse than Skyping in Antarctica. Even her deepest loves in her adulthood have gone away, and she feels very much alone in the world. Which in part drives her to build meaningful relationships with others, in hopes they might be spared the awful loneliness that her position has created.
The five defining traits of Mantis:
- Freak: Green, half-plant, reincarnating, and generally has a wildly odd suite of abilities. She is used to standing out among humans, and accepts that her augmentations make her fully 'other' to the rest of the world. Sometimes that deeply saddens her.
- Mother: Her maternal instinct and desire to help others is a guiding principle of her psyche. She also spins and hatches ideas as a force of intense creation.
- Lover: She gives herself passionately to those things she trusts in, but giving her trust and faith is so very, very hard. She fears being hurt. She is happiest in duality, supported as she supports.
- Mystic: The vastness of the universe and its mysteries are a comfort, rather than frightening. She believes in forces that others would not put stock in, including magic and prophecy. Her own concern with cosmic harmony isn't a mild preoccupation: it defines almost all she does.
- Avenger: Earth is her home. She will do whatever she must to keep it safe.
Mantis has a tremendous capacity for reflecting on and analyzing feelings, her own or another person's. Throw a plight in front of her, and she will undoubtedly trip into that snare of self-reflection. She finds it easy to peer deeper into the soul of a person, teasing out their motivations and limitations. Dishonesty doesn't stop her from finding out the truth. Manipulations and disingenuous tactics have a way of falling flat. It's no mystical power: she perceives the patterns connecting people and events. Patterns often repeat themselves. Familiarity helps her predict likely outcomes, and she uses her insights to get to the heart of a matter.
Mantis is a classic INFJ (borderline ENFJ), the type of person with an inborn sense of idealism and morality. She's far from an idle dreamer, though. She sees helping others as her purpose in life, delving to the heart of any issue so people need no rescue at all. She possesses an unusual blend of traits: soft-spoken but holding strong convictions, she fights tirelessly for the cause she puts her faith in. Strong-willed and decisive, she acts for the greater good rather than personal gain. Creativity and sensitivity serve to create balance, not personal advantage, a trait as near to her core as anything.
As far as Mantis is concerned, the world would be better if hard hearts and cruel minds were tempered and helped by compassion and softness. The passion of her conviction is more than capable of pushing her past the breaking point, however. It can be very, very difficult for Mantis to say "No" and carve out personal time for herself.
She holds a strong sense of justice, but an even stronger sense of karmic balance. Celestial Madonna that she is, she holds a deep, abiding awareness of when things have gone askew. Her world is full of inequity — and she understands this, taking care of the world so it can try to take care of itself.
Mantis doesn't deal well with criticism or persistent conflict, especially rooted in negativity. It's possible for her to stand up to it for a while, but then she lashes out or evades the situation. She also has to be mindful to avoid taking on other people's problems as her own in some kind of metaphorical emotional hypochondria.
There are no half-measures where Mantis is concerned. She commits to something full throttle, throwing herself into its pursuit. When she believes something is important, she chases that goal with a conviction that can shock hose around her. Passion is an inseparable part of her identity.
Too long she spent her life bound up, socially inept, held back by her own strictures. The problem is, she needs a cause to put her passion behind or else she has nowhere to let off steam or direct herself.
"Leave the world a better place than you found it."
Mantis wants to have a real impact on the world, a meaningful one. She acts on her insights through complex plans, organization, grit, and sheer determination. Once she gets her heels in, she's going to act and not much is going to shake her from that course.
On the other hand, being /too/ decisive means she can respond BADLY to criticism of her chosen course. Questioning her motives is a great way to get on her dark side. And that dark side is utterly and completely evil.
Mantis doesn't open up fully to many people. She presents herself according to a certain image and dislikes aspects of herself that suggest a work in progress. The image she projects is what most people get, but they don't get to see the broken, mended, doubting, concerned freak/lover/mystic under the surface. She wants you to feel good and not worry about her. Ye gods, don't you ever dare.
She is extremely private about her personal life, to the point even teammates of hers may never know she has a child somewhere. In part it is because life isolated taught her very few skills about opening up with others, but because she genuinely fears a close connection will lead to harsh judgment. She also measures her self-esteem by whether she can live up to her own sky-high ideals. If she fails to help someone she said she'd help, her self-confidence hits the rocks.
There's no force on Earth or in the stars that will hold back Mantis if she said she was going to do something. Her cause or her people are her goal in life. If it's possible, she finds a way to do it. If she said she would, she will come hell or high water. And with her vivid imagination, she's going to resolve technical, social, and human challenges like you wouldn't believe.
Mantis is defined by her greater causes, and passion grants her purpose in life. Goal-oriented? You have no idea. She needs to find meaning in what she does, rationalized to help someone somewhere. In particular this means assisting her teammates in attaining fulfillment and a harmonious balance with their lives. Whether a Guardian or an Avenger, she wants to inspire those she cares about to become better themselves.
The strange collision of alternate realities gives Mantis real pause, and she wants to understand better what caused it, who originated it, and what ramifications are set to land upon the universe (as she knows it).
Also, reabsorbing any broken parts of herself lands as fairly important.
Do good. Do right. Do what must be done.
Mantis is an altruist, at some levels, and she has little fear about standing up to speak for the causes and people she values most. She can be a powerfully inspirational force, leading the charge to guide a united team towards a brighter future.
She wants to right the wrongs in the world, and balance out the dark with the light. By caring deeply for the fate and plight of others, she may put herself at risk, but it's all for a very, very good cause, right?
Mantis channels psionic energy into telepathy or telekinesis.
Telekinesis: She excels at forming energy shields and barriers around herself and others. Personal range is the easiest for her to sustain long-term, though bombardment by powerful attacks collapses her telekinetic defenses. Finessed use of her telekinesis to manipulate items, like wires or a set of keys, requires total attention. Levitation is clumsy and slow, and gross effects are taxing.
Telepathy: She reads minds and thoughts, and communicates with other sentient beings at a general range of 250 mi. Close connections with others can increase the range to interplanetary distances. Creating short-term illusions and implant suggestions might confound a human, but psychics can defeat these unless she exerts great focus and force. Mantis is better skilled at forming mental shields through intense meditation that can her spiritually and mental impervious to many forms of telepathic attack. On the other hand, she can do nothing /but/ meditate.
Mantis creates an intangible, ephemeral construct in her likeness. She can project herself into the astral plane or the physical realm in a 'ghostly' form or via a plant proxy.
Reality: By vibrating out of step with the dominant universe, Mantis becomes immaterial. She can still be perceived (unless taking precautions to conceal herself, like manifesting in a dark room). She uses her senses as normal, and normal barriers no longer inhibit her. Therefore she might move through a wall as if she were a ghost. Tangible objects normally unable to affect ghosts, spirits, or ephemeral creations cannot harm her. She cannot affect the 'real world.' Anything in her dimension can affect her as if she's physical, and vice versa. The distance to which she can communicate isn't known to have an upward limit.
Astral Plane: Her projection reaches onto the astral plane, a realm of pure thought and possibility typically reached only by gifted psychics. Her projection is a pure construct of will and her soul. In this projection her physical body is vulnerable and any attempt to sever or capture her soul would leave her physically defenseless. She can become ill or die from lack of nourishment.
Plants: Due to her Cotati training, Mantis can manifest herself in any sufficiently vegetated area. A cactus in a desert would serve; the icefields of the Arctic would not. In this case she projects herself through the life energies of the plants. She must have a relative idea of the vegetation and location in the area, if not honed onto a specific person. She can also use plants to physically teleport herself to a location.
Mantis has nearly perfect control over her body and mind thanks to an extraordinarily advanced alien training regimen based on Kree and Cotati eudcation. She can ascertain the state of her body through simple concentration, identifying toxins or damage.
Alterations: This permits her to control aspects of her physiology, like heart rate, circulation, and breathing, with absolute finesse. She can shut off pain receptors or heighten her sensitivity, thereby giving her a slightly superhuman range for her senses.
Muscle Control: Mantis can control her musculature to a degree that she can break free from bonds by specific contortions and movements. Much like a cat or krate can fit into tight, irregular spaces, she achieves this without complete dislocation of her joints. Essentially keeping her confined or behind bars is extremely difficult.
Mantis can affect vegetal lifeforms, sentient or not. This plant control allows for her to modify or augment plants on a sliding scale. A touch might force seeds to sprout or coax a bud to blossom out of season. Vines might ensnare an enemy or a root lift to trip someone pursuing her with a thought.
Communication: She can generally communicate with sentient vegetal forms, like Groot, or understand their non-verbal speech. This ability is wholly limited by her or the target's intellect. Long story short, if it can only think in terms of pinecones, she's not talking about Descartes.
Plant Empatny At the most heightened effect, she extends her empathic abilities through the present vegetation across a rather vast area.
Dead: Mantis can be reborn through a plant body, though the specific mechanics are purely for plot purposes.
Due to her body control and alterations, Mantis displays a degree of strength and dexterity at slightly beyond superhuman ranges. She can lift approximately ten times what a normal human woman in exceptional physical condition can manage. She runs faster than 50 miles per hour in a sprint, though she is limited sustaining this over the long term. and her reflexes are considerably faster than normal. She reacts at lightning speeds to threats, relying on her agility and keenly developed martial arts abilities to stay out of trouble.
Endurance: Mantis' durability is advanced well beyond human norms. Injuries that would debilitate or kill a human will render her comatose instead, tapping her accelerated healing factor until she can consciously tap into her recuperative abilities. Grievous injuries will cannibalize her body stores until she's conscious unless she receives proper attention. Mental and physical assaults on her have a reduced impact.
Mantis is first and foremost an empath, capable of detecting the emotional state of sentient creatures around her. Her talents extend to sentient non-human evocations, like the Vision, with a widened degree of fallibility. Her empathy depends largely on non-verbal cues, including feeling aural vibrations, and gives her general insight to a subject's overall state. She might recognize a woman wants to hurt another person and extrapolate the anger is directed towards another woman in the crowd, but she can't determine the cause (an affair) without tapping her telepathy or old-fashioned problem-solving.
By entering a healing trance, Mantis can repair damage to her body. She recuperates energy. Cosmetic and minor wounds take mere minutes to manage, whereas more extensive injuries take hours at an accelerated rate. This power does not overcome any effect that a seasoned surgeon or physician with access to proper resources would not be able to heal.
As her psychic abilities mature, Mantis experiences precognitive visions that give her deep insights to future events. Future timelines of course change in response to actions and reactions, and she understands nothing she views is set in stone. Even the most gifted of seers cannot foresee all ends. Laden in symbolism and cryptic metaphors, her visions infrequently provide a direct message about a given subject. Instead she is battered by epic dreams and sweeping, rich imagery, overcome by powerful emotions, or assaulted by patterns that need a deliberate effort to untangle if they're to make any sense.
As a byproduct of what she considers sacred, Mantis doesn't believe in telling the subjects of her precognitive experiences about her revelations. Attempting to interfere with time, or worse, avert what's coming damages cosmic harmony and she cannot let that stand.
Dark truths hurt. They are her burden to bear.
Mantis has the power to control fire and, under deep focus, to create fire from thin air.
Control: Control of an existing flame is much easier for her. She can change the shape and volume of the fire, heighten or reduce the temperature, and alter other properties like colour. Offensively she can redirect or throw fire at a target, limited by its actual size. Mantis tends to produce thin beams or columns rather than throwing balls. The bigger or more intense the fire (say, magnesium), the better her capacity to cause hurt or things to go catastrophically wrong. Her control is sketchy if she's upset. It's purely normal flame unless the source is supernatural/magical.
Creation: Mantis converts ambient energy into energy blasts on fire. The greater the volume, the more energy and concentration required. Unlike the fire she controls, this source has a mystical quality and may be subject to normal magical protections above and beyond things resistant to flame. On the other hand, flame retardant won't suppress it. Drawing out large quantities will leave her weak or unconscious.
Mantis ran with the Avengers for quite some time on a grand many adventures, and she harbours a deep, abiding affection for the team she naturally considers her own. Maybe they've been focused more on Earth and she more on the cosmos, but her return to New York finds her eager to restore her connections with them. Her allies can count on her lifelong assistance to their causes, and in turn, she depends on them to help her out when the going gets rough. Even when her affiliation has been elsewhere, they've held her loyalty.
The Guardians of the Galaxy are an eclectic bunch which Mantis tended the psychological needs of. With that many lively personalities (and issues), a girl needs a level view on life and very deep reserves of patience. She used her training in great stead holding the team together as their heart and soul some days. They think of her on good terms, and even if she has taken on a more terrestrial role in the very recent past, she still counts herself among them too. Besides, can't let Gamora be the *only* quick tempered green-skinned woman around.
Mantis can tie herself into a double-helix, do a mesmerizing fan-dance that hypnotizes the Lion-God, and all while wearing impractical heels. Her agility and physical grace are by far above the human norm. Need someone who has to bend herself out of the way or slip through the bars? She's your girl.
Eternity and Death actually know whom Mantis is, and gave her the Cosmic Hotline to be able to communicate with them when she needs to. Or more appropriately when they see fit to communicate with her for their completely incomprehensible reasons. She's been bathed in the power of the Infinity Gems, though not without costs. The Silver Surfer has (had?) romantic feelings for her. Mantis has a few aces up the sleeve if and when it matters. Though she doesn't know why.
Mantis doesn't die easy. If she dies at all. She's been completely reconstituted from base matter when her physical body was sort of destroyed, and she can rebuild her physical form out of plant life. Someone else can rebuild her out of pure energy if they want to. She has been reborn by the formation of her 'shards,' those incomplete shadow-selves still on the loose.
Those antennae don't serve just to transmit radiowaves or the BBC broadcast. They may make her cute, but they also give her an effect like whiskers. (And empathy, for that matter.) Teeny, tiny vibrations help to give her a deeper sense of the world. She can use them as a sixth sense of sorts, augmenting her tactile sense to help her explore and understand her surroundings. They have fifty times the innervation of terrestrial mammals, allowing her to add to or replace vision, especially in near/total darkness. She can use these to help gain sensory information and detect direction.
Mantis is very adaptable to a natural environment. She finds few temperatures outside extreme bands (Death Valley summers, Siberian winter) can really bother her, especially if she has time to adjust her body accordingly. Give her time, she'll find a way to be comfortable just about anywhere, sort of like a cat.
Mantis is a grandmaster martial artist, a deadly opponent in her own right. She may be one of the most formidable female opponents on Earth.
She was trained by the Priests of Pama in a broad variety of martial arts techniques. She has mastered Kree techniques that focus intensely on pressure point activation, immobilising and weakening immensely stronger foes on the scale of Thor even if her own super-powered abilities are commensurately far less. She is highly specialized in incapacitating or weakening foes by attacking weak points in their physiology, an ability that combined with her psionic and bio-empathic skills, makes her a match for nearly any martial artist, including Gamora. She has a deep and intuitive understanding for most forms of terrestrial martial arts, although she prefers styles based on jiu jutsu, aikido, taekwondo, jeet kun do, and wing chun. She's a walking, talking encyclopedia on historical and traditional styles of Earth, ranging from their application to modern permutations.
Her background in cosmic styles have been obtained during her long journeys with the Avengers and later, the Guardians of the Galaxy. She is seasoned in hand-to-hand combat techniques used on Asgard, the weaponry and evasion styles of the Shi'ar Empire, and refined variations of Gamora's own intense training. As such, she has formidable talents dealing even with foreign physiologies, including robots/non-organic life forms.
Mantis prefers unarmed combat, but she's no slouch when it comes to wielding archaic or futuristic weaponry. She is at her most dangerous using swords, knives, batons, and extensions of her hands. Her strong background in aikido makes her particularly proficient with a bo staff, particularly when it comes to launching self-defense against a physically superior opponent. Many of her unarmed techniques can be used with blunt force pressure, or an edged weapon. She has lengthy and rigorous training using variations on these weapons, including those with force projection or made of exotic materials, during her time among the Avengers.
She's more than capable with an energy weapon like a pistol, though due to her respect for life, she doesn't enjoying using these weapons. Her expertise lies more in accuracy and rapid shots than any sort of trick shots.
Mantis has spent her adult life outside Earth, roaming to the very far reaches of the Shi'ar and Kree Empires in good company. One of those guys rode around on a shiny surfboard, taking her for a ride. She knows the cultural attributes of many peoples scattered around the galaxy, and she knows the finer points in dealing with them. Need to know the laws? She can give some great pointers. What was that place we were supposed to avoid? Mantis probably has a lot of random facts about that too.
Had Mantis returned to a normal life on Earth, she would be an exceptional, unflappable psychologist. In fact, that's the role she stepped into as her mortal cover, though her particular skill set favours mutant and superhuman/supernatural clients rather than normal humans. It helps to be a telepathic and a notable empath, serene enough to endure the worst turbulence of the psyche, but she has real and honest experience study psychiatry, psychology, and emerging trends. Her specialty is cognitive behavioural therapy, where she challenges negative thought patterns or habits to empower a client to overcome their own limitations.
Above and beyond that, her time as a barmaid in Vietnam gives her the essential life skills of hearing just about every kind of sob story. There isn't any education like a bartender or a barmaid for learning the depths of human desire and despair.
Mantis has extensively studied the nature of the body, be it human, Kree, or even weirder physiology. She isn't a top level biologist by any stretch of the imagination. She understands how biofeedback systems work, therefore how to exploit them to overwhelm someone with great pain or euphoria. She can trigger a number of low to high-level responses with the proper tools, like triggering responses based on pheromones. This aids her in healing herself and others, as much as incapacitating them.
She likes growing living plants, including sentient ones like Groot. Give her seeds, soil, and a pot, and she'll be in a happy space for days. Mantis has a fondness for plants—and that isn't because one inhabited her partner, and she became the mother of a half-human, half-plant messiah.
She deeply enjoys the presence of plants and can define a venomous or carnivorous species based on a few indicators. Her green thumb is pretty much peridot at this point. She can rehab the fussiest African violet and distill lovely scents from old, forgotten species.
Mantis understands the basic principles of the occult, particularly the fundamentals of drawing energy from oneself, ambient sources, empowered sources (like artifacts), and external sources (like worship or blood sacrifice). She has a passing familiarity with how to tap these sources for energy if she wanted to.
Though hardly an expert, she can extend her senses to detect simple magical presences and glean information about the force, like the source, the 'type' of magic, its relative power, whether the effect is a spell or a mystical phenomenon, or its mystical fingerprint for later identification. With focus and meditation, she can identify a ritual's purpose and nature.
For reasons known only to herself, Mantis is really good at lattes and latte art. She has far too much fun drawing ferns in foam. Yes, she has a French press. Oui, she's totally a snob about her flat whites. Si, you're not impressing her with your doodle art cappuccino half-soy no whip fluffery.
A sweet disposition and reasoned words will get you anywhere in the world. Everywhere when intimidation and unkind actions fail, anyways. Mantis is a generally sweet, compassionate person who doesn't register as 'big bad' in the room. Not until she kicks your face in, but regardless, she has a distinctly outgoing quality when she dials up her personality.
Mantis speaks a rather dizzying variety of languages with passing ease, though she is fully fluent in English, Vietnamese, German, Mandarin, Cantonese, French, Kree (really), Asgardian, and a variety of useful trade polyglots. Yay her.
Mantis' convictions are tremendous. She will not back down or bend, and her mental techniques learned through monastic living with the Priests of Pama overcome typical suggestions and mental lures. Temptation does not affect her very well. When she gets her heels in, you're not going to make her move.
Mantis can leave someone writhing in pain from a touch. By the same token, she can press down on a specific point on the sacral nerve and leave someone loose with bliss. She is gifted at managing pain and physical therapies targeting the musculoskeletal and nervous systems. A good portion of her medical training is founded on Kree learning from the Priests of Pama, blended to Vietnamese and traditional Chinese medicine, and more modern techniques.
She's also somewhat competent at emergency field medicine, dressing wounds, and performing basic first aid. She can perform CPR, bandage a wound, and treat a nasty infection from some mysterious plant that shouldn't live in Hell's Kitchen.
At the end of the day, Mantis prefers to use a non-violent solution for all of life's violent problems. She would much rather break bread and talk than resort to disturbances to cosmic harmony. This puts her at risk among people who default to violence first and foremost.
That being said, even when she does defer to violent options, she uses her training to incapacitate as quickly as possible to avoid further harm to any of the fighting parties. Her tools are merely a means to bring about a calm end.
Due to her extensive travels outside the country of her birth, Mantis sees most events from 40,000 feet rather than ground-level. It's not that she doesn't care about everyone's day to day worries (she does), she simply tends to take a much, much broader view of things. She finds it hard to muster urgency and concern over the rent not being paid on time, or the bad Chinese place on the corner taking 20 minutes longer than they quoted to deliver because those concerns haven't been relevant to her in a very long time.
The Priests of Pama meant well when they wiped out Mantis' memory at age 18. They wanted her to have a happy adulthood in preparation to become the Celestial Madonna. What they did, instead, was eradicate all those happy achievements and difficult triumphs, recollections however brief of her father, and whole strands of experiences. They made her vulnerable to /doubt/ herself, and her past, which is a psychological rift a particularly perceptive and talented individual might be able to exploit. As has been seen in the past, her memory isn't perfect and that can cause ramifications when others rely on her.
In the not-too-distant past, Mantis ended up broken by a cosmic power into multiple versions of herself. These shards personified one aspect of her personality in a broad sweep (e. g., thief, mystic, etc.). She spent years trying to recover her broken parts, and reassemble herself into the whole person she was meant to be all along. Unfortunately she can never be certain she obtained them all, and her psychic shards are embodied in physical, independent women who can and do have their own lives. Of course, as soon as she shows up on the scene, merging with them becomes an almost foreordained outcome. But those Mantises don't want to give up their independent selves, usually, and they might freak out /badly/ realizing she was there. Now she has the bulk of experience and skill on her side, but if Betsy Braddock had a bad time tethering herself to Kwannon, imagine how bad Mantis has it. There's at least one or two of herself running around.
Worse.. there are possibly imposters - illusionary constructs created for complicated reasons to throw off her enemies, especially from the days when she was the Celestial Madonna.
The Celestial Madonna garnered much attention during her pregnancy. Her son, Sequoia (Quoi), already wields a limited form of the power cosmic. Enemies could certainly exploit that to get at Mantis, or more likely, exploit Mantis to get at her son. She knows her Achilles heel, too.
Thanos. Kang (seriously wtf Kang). The Gardener. Sometimes Scarlet Witch, forgetting that Vision isn't her lover. Libra (her own father). Some pretty big names don't like Mantis and she doesn't have much love for them herself.
Mantis is not all light, sunshine, and rainbows. She has a decided dark side usually held in check by her spiritual meditations, love for life, and respect for others. But trip it, and things go /bad/ swiftly.
She knows how to hurt people, and in her shadow id, has no compunctions whatsoever about inflicting pain and suffering to almost sadistic degrees. It's necessary to put the offender in their place with such overwhelming force, bordering on overkill, that they never interfere or criticise her again. If the lesson cannot be learned the nice way, she'll inflict it to a degree the message gets across loud, bloody, and clear. And remorse will not be likely to factor in.
- Born to Libra (Gustav Brandt) and Lau Nguyen in Vietnam.
- Libra abandons her with the Priests of Pama, a Kree sect who believed she would be the Celestial Madonna, a prophecy that a woman would become the mother to the inheritor of the power cosmic.
- Spends her childhood in intense study and preparation to be worthy as the Madonna. Deep focus on purification and perfecting herself limits her social development.
- Trained to alien martial arts to perfect her as a human vessel until she was 18.
- Mindwiped and released in anticipation of gaining 'life experience.'
- Employed in Macau, Hong Kong, and Singapore as a barmaid.
- Met an Avenger in a bar and through her compassion, restored his mental health.
- Accompanied the Avenger back to the U.S. and became an ally/junior member to the team on their many adventures.
- Kang the Conqueror searched for the Celestial Madonna, putting her and her teammates in grave danger.
- Revealed as the Celestial Madonna.
- The Swordsman confessed his love to her after a fatal attack by Kang the Conquerer.
- Ascended as the Celestial Madonna to fulfill the prophecy and conceived a son, Sequoia.
- Dwelled offworld in concealment to avoid attention from Kang, Thanos, Galactus, and others.
- Surrendered her son (unwillingly) to the Priests of Pama to be safely raised and prepared for his future.
- During her ongoing adventures, she suffered an attack that shattered her into multiple fragmented versions of herself.
- A fragmented psyche discovered Thanos attempted to kill her son.
- Rejoined the Avengers and gathered her stray shards with their assistance, regaining her memories and abilities.
- Imprisoned briefly by the Kree.
- Joined the Guardians of the Galaxy, and proved instrumental in freeing other captive members from Ultron and Phalanx's stronghold.
- Recuperated among the Guardians of the Galaxy, helping the team coalesce into a coherent force for galactic stability.
- Returned to Earth with intention of rejoining the Avengers.
- Set up shop as a psychologist in New York.
- It's not easy being green. :(
General Society:
Mantis served an exciting term with the Avengers, fighting alongside Captain America and Thor on myriad adventures. Her exceptional martial arts skills kept Earth safe from aliens, existential threats, and bad coffee. She abruptly departed after the death of another Avenger. The details were somewhat murky.
The Celestial Madonna:
Certain groups know about the Kree prophecy of the Celestial Madonna, a legendary figure. Mantis transcended to bear the next wielder of the force cosmic, explaining her departure from the Avengers. Nothing like fleeing across the galaxy to evade the likes of Thanos and worse. (Yes, there is worse.)
Cosmic Matters:
About a year after her ascension, Mantis ended up a minted and respected member of the Guardians of the Galaxy. Aliens probably know her well as the heart and soul of the team, and one of its less unstable figures. Her departure from the Guardians was on amicable terms, if somewhat confounding. Rumour has it she perceived some great matter (like the rise of terrible coffee anew) requiring her attention, and returned to Earth.
Current State:
The Celestial Madonna returns from her galaxy-spanning adventures to New York City for reasons unknown to the general public. Have you seen a jade-skinned young woman around Hell's Kitchen and jamming it up in community gardens across the west side of the island? Mantis has kept a low profile, though she reactivated her standing with the Avengers and spends considerable time trying to reorient herself to the changes in the city. She also frequents disreputable gyms and cheap but delicious noodle stands.
IC Events
Logs tagged with "mantis" will appear here automatically.
15 Sep 2016 11:04 (2016-09-14) Avengers Assembling
31 Aug 2016 17:58 (2016-08-30) The Return of Mantis
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