Mantis

Mantis was born in Vietnam to Gustav Brandt, later known as Libra, and Lua Nguyen. As a child, she was entrusted to the alien Priests of Pama, a Kree sect that believed she was destined to become the Celestial Madonna. They trained her extensively in martial arts and psychic disciplines, then altered her memories so she could experience life outside the temple without knowing her true purpose. As a young woman she met the Swordsman, helped him turn away from crime, and followed him when he returned to the Avengers. Mantis soon became an Avenger herself and fought alongside the team against threats including Thanos and Kang the Conqueror.

Kang eventually discovered that Mantis was the Celestial Madonna, a woman prophesied to bear the Celestial Messiah. Swordsman sacrificed his life protecting her from Kang, and Mantis later returned his body to the temple where she had been raised. The eldest of the telepathic Cotati inhabited Swordsman’s body and revealed the truth of her destiny. After her lost memories were restored, Mantis accepted the prophecy and married the Cotati, leaving Earth so they could conceive the child who became Quoi.

Mantis later returned to a life of cosmic adventure, eventually reuniting the fragmented portions of her psyche and becoming involved with the Avengers again. She joined Star-Lord’s forces during the Phalanx invasion and became part of the modern Guardians of the Galaxy, where her psychic abilities made her especially valuable as a precognitive adviser. Years later, Quoi assumed leadership of the Cotati and launched an invasion of Earth. Mantis opposed her son’s campaign despite wanting to save him from the path he had chosen.

Appearance: Mantis has light, warm-toned skin and long, flowing black hair that spreads out in soft, glossy waves behind her. Two slender, tapered antennae extend from under her headband, curving upward with a smooth, organic shape. She has green eyes, framed by long lashes and sharply defined brows. Her lips are full and softly colored. She wears a fitted blue jacket with a high collar, trimmed in red along the edges and secured with dark buttons down the front. The sleeves are accented with wide, glossy red cuffs, each detailed with black fasteners. A black belt with pouches is strapped at her waist, cinching the jacket to her form. Below it hangs a short green skirt composed of layered, leaf-like panels that flare apart in uneven strips. She also wears black boots.

Personality: Mantis possesses a calm, perceptive, and quietly analytical nature, her intelligence sharpened by years of disciplined training. Her mind works with precise, almost surgical clarity, allowing her to read people and situations with uncanny accuracy. She speaks in a serene, measured tone, expressing herself through the detached third-person phrasing taught by the Priests of Pama (referring to herself as "This one"), which reinforces her belief in being one part of a greater cosmic whole. More recently, she uses "I" to refer to herself mostly. Her worldview blends intuition, logic, and spiritual insight, making her both emotionally grounded and philosophically distant. Though gentle and compassionate, she is unwavering once she identifies a truth, and her quiet demeanor hides a will that is steady, centered, and remarkably strong.

Mantis possesses a unique form of telepathy she calls biopathy, which allows her to communicate with both animal and plant life. Her telepathic communication can send or receive impressions that affect all the recipient’s senses, and her mind is naturally resistant to mental or metaphysical intrusion. Her empathy is finely tuned, letting her sense emotional vibrations from others and communicate directly with the plant-like Cotati. She is also capable of astral projection, allowing her to leave her physical body behind and travel interplanetary distances; upon arrival, she can form a new temporary body out of the vegetation native to the destination world. In this state, her martial skills remain intact, and her empathic awareness expands across a planet’s entire biosphere.

Mantis can manipulate plant life, accelerating or altering growth at will, and even changing biological properties such as making Groot’s sap flammable. She can generate pyrokinetic energy to attack foes, and she has demonstrated the ability to ignite Groot from within by targeting his sap. Her powers also include creating force fields and cloaking herself from detection, which she has extended to others despite the difficulty. She sometimes experiences precognitive flashes, although they are limited and only partially controllable; she has foreseen entire missions, including the deaths of teammates, and kept the knowledge to ensure events unfolded correctly. Mantis is impressively durable, withstanding mental, physical, and metaphysical harm, and she can heal herself through focused will.

Her training as a Celestial Madonna made her one of the most formidable martial artists in the galaxy. She fights using ancient disciplines that rely on manipulating pressure points and nerve clusters, enabling her to incapacitate beings far stronger than herself, even stunning Thor with precise strikes. Her mastery of her own body allows her to consciously control her autonomic nervous system, adjusting her heart rate, breathing, blood flow, and recovery speed. This same discipline grants her peak human agility and the ability to enter deep meditative states where she becomes largely immune to physical, spiritual, or mental harm.