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Fighting: |
In |
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Agility: |
In |
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Strength: |
Gd |
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Endurance: |
Am |
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Reason: |
Gd |
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Intuition: |
In |
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Psyche: |
Mn |
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Health: |
140 |
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Karma: |
125 |
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Resources: |
Gd |
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Popularity: |
20 |
Real Name: Unknown
Alias: the Celestial Madonna
Occupation: Barmaid, later adventurer, later Celestial Madonna
Legal Status: Citizen of Canada with no criminal record; citizen of Deluvia, now deceased
Identity: Secret
Place of Birth: Unknown village in Vietnam
Marital Status: Married
Known Relatives: Gustav Brandt (alias Lloyd Willowby, father), Lua Brandt (mother, deceased), Khrull (uncle), “Celestial Messiah” (son, unknown)
Base of Operations: Temple of Priests of Pama, Vietnam; later, Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon); later Avengers Mansion, New York City; later space, currently unknown
Past Group Affiliations: Former member of the Avengers, former ally of the Silver Surfer
Known Powers:
Plant Abilities: Mantis has inherited some of the abilities of the Cotati. She has the Monstrous ability to communicate mentally with plant life. She can use the knowledge gained in this manner to discover the location of water or warn her in case intruders approach, among other things. She can teleport from plant to plant with Unearthly ability, teleporting even between worlds many parsecs distant.
Life Support: Mantis has Shift-Y Life Support; she can survive in space or on hostile worlds for prolonged periods of time (limits unknown), but will require food, water, and sleep in time.
Healing: By using herbs and the like, Mantis can employ Monstrous power rank healing.
Avenger - Mantis: Before she joined the Cotati, Mantis had the following statistics and powers:
| F | A | S | E | R | I | P | |
| In | In | Ty | Rm | Ty | Ex | Am | |
| Heaath: 116 |
Karma: 76 |
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| Empathy: Trained by the priests of Pama,
Mantis has this power at Amazing rank. Recovery: Mantis has complete con trol over her body, allowing her to heal at Amazing speeds. Resistances: Mantis has Incredible resistance to toxins and diseases. |
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Talents:
Mantis has Martial Arts (types A, B, D, and E) and has the Resist Domination talent.
Contacts:
Mantis was trained by the Priests of Pama (now destroyed). Her father is Gustav Brandt (also known as the criminal Libra). She was a member of the Avengers, a mate of the Cotati, and an ally of the Silver Surfer.
Role-Playing Notes:
As an Avenger, Mantis was haughty and cruel, trying to take away the Vision from the Scarlet Witch, scorning the Swordsman (who loved her), and generally causing trouble. When the Swordsman died for her, however, she learned humility, the final lesson needed to turn her into the Celestial Madonna.
Mantis in her cosmic form is more mature, capable of love and sacrifice. Mantis was totally devoted to the protection of the universe from the Elders. If she still lives, she will likely remain dormant until another major threat occurs. Mantis has the habit of referring to herself as “this one.”
History:
Mantis was the daughter of Gustav Brandt, a German who fought in Indochina as a mercenary soldier, and his wife Lua, the sister of Monsieur Khrull, the leader of a local underworld organization. Despising Europeans, Khrull was infuriated by his sister’s marriage and was determined to kill both her and her husband. As a result, the Brandts fled from one Indochinese village to another for nearly ten months. When Mantis was born, Khrull and his men found the couple and used flame-throwers to set their home ablaze. Lua was killed. Badly burned and blinded, Gustav Brandt escaped with his infant daughter, who was unharmed. Days later they reached the temple of the Priests of Pama, a pacifistic sect of the humanoid alien Kree, who established temples on various worlds to escape Kree persecution.
The Priests educated Brandt’s daughter, who they knew might someday become the Celestial Madonna, the woman who would mother the Celestial Messiah, a genetically perfect being of great power who would bring peace to the universe. Mantis was also taught to communicate telepathically with the Cotati, an alien race of telepathic plant-beings the Kree had brought to Earth. One of these beings was to father the Celestial Messiah.
When Mantis had completed her training, the Priests decided that she needed to experience life among the humans. Therefore, on the night of Mantis’s eighteenth birthday, two of the Priests took her, dressed in ordinary Vietnamese clothing, to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) and left her there. The Priests of Pama had removed Mantis’s memories of her life at their temple, and instead gave her false memories of growing up in Saigon as an orphan, struggling to survive.
Within hours, Mantis was taken to Monsieur Khrull; neither knew of their relationship. At a bar Khrull owned she eventually met the Swordsman, a costumed criminal on the run. Mantis saw a buried nobility in the alcoholic man and tried to get him to rehabilitate himself. Taking her advice, he returned to America, Mantis accompanying him. When the Swordsman was readmitted to the Avengers, she was allowed to stay at Avengers’ Mansion as a courtesy to him.
After the Avengers defeated Zodiac with her help, Libra revealed to Mantis that he was her father and told her how she had been raised in a temple, although he did not explain to her who the Priests of Pama really were. One day soon after, the Avengers were attacked by their archenemy from the future, Kang the Conqueror, who had determined that one of the women then associated with the Avengers was the Celestial Madonna. Kang knew of the prophecy that the Celestial Madonna’s’ husband would be the “most powerful” being on Earth. Although Kang was thwarted in his plan, he discovered and revealed to Mantis and the Avengers that Mantis was the Celestial Madonna. In the course of these events, the Swordsman was killed by a stray blast from one of Kang’s weapons. As the Swordsman died, Mantis realized that she had indeed loved him.
Later, in the Priests’ temple gar den in Vietnam, Mantis and her Avenger comrades encountered Libra and the glowing, reanimated body of the Swordsman, reanimated by Earth’s oldest Cotati, which now resembled a large tree in the garden. The Cotati told Mantis that she was the Celestial Madonna and that he was to be her husband. He had reanimated the Swordsman’s body with part of his life force since he could not mate with her in his tree-like form. Their child would be “a new life form,” the Celestial Messiah.
In honor of Mantis, the Avengers unanimously declared her one of them. Immortus, master of time, officiated at the wedding of Mantis and the Cotati. Once the ceremony was finished, the Cotati (within the Swordsman’s body) and Mantis both transformed themselves into pure energy and departed Earth.
Mantis gave birth to the Celestial Messiah and then left her husband and her son to aid the Silver Surfer in stopping a plot by the Elders of the Universe to kill Galactus, falling in love with the Surfer. Mantis and the Surfer’s ex-love, Shalla-bal, were captured by the Gardener, and Mantis apparently gave up her life to save Shalla-bal when the trap in which they were encased exploded. How ever, given Mantis’s powers, she may have found some way to survive.