Mantis

Player
Kate

Personality
Mantis will be meek to start, due to her lack of exposure to other beings and the limitations of her academic knowledge of interactions, but not-so-deep down, she’s pure sunshine and rainbows, with a dash of mischief. She cares for people quickly and sees the best in them, and wants to be happy with other people. She lives in the moment, her emotions consuming her completely but passing quickly.

Perhaps the textbook definition of naive, she’s easily manipulated because of her lack of experience in literally everything. Her life has always been lonely, and she desperately wants to make friends! Although she does have a conscience and generally wants to do good, the morality of her actual actions will be heavily influenced by the company she’s in.

Powers

 * Touch-based empathy: skin-to-skin contact enables Mantis to feel the emotions of others, and strong emotions can overpower her own, at least until skin contact is broken.
 * Empathic manipulation: “If I touch someone who is sad, I can ease them into contentment for a short while. I can make a stubborn person compliant. But I mostly use it to make my master sleep.” She can influence the emotions of others with rapid effect, including calming them with a sedative effect.
 * Her empathic manipulation is much stronger than she knows, but is also closely tied to her own emotions and confidence levels.
 * She’s also able to make someone face their emotions, especially when she’s in danger. So someone who compartmentalizes their emotions might suddenly find themselves neck deep in them instead.
 * Superhuman durability, unusual strength: Despite her apparent fragility, Mantis is extremely durable (comparable to Gamora and Drax) and can survive, though she seems prone to being knocked out - perhaps something to do with her sensitive antennae. As for strength, she’s not going to be throwing people across the room, she’s just stronger than a human woman of her size should be (around that of a very strong human male).
 * At present she is unaware of her boosted strength and durability, though I’m sure it came in handy for a child growing up on her own, not suffering burns or injuries while unsupervised.

Talents
Empathy (not the superpowered kind), making people smile. Once trained, she’ll prove a capable fighter, if not a particularly reliable one...

Interests
“Fun! And friends! And-- OHhh, what is that?” (She’s got a world’s worth of learning to do, and she’s interested in ALL OF IT.)

History
Mantis was only 3 years old when the Jasper event took place, which woke her X-gene - and landed her in the middle of the Sentinel Containment Zone. In the immediate confusion, she was separated from her parents and picked up by a fellow mutant, Ego. A loner and reluctant rescuer, he’d intended to ditch the small child with big black eyes and glowing antennae at the first chance he got. But times got worse, not better, and no easy opportunity to foist the toddler on other mutant refugees presented itself.

Self-centered narcissist that he was, Ego probably would have abandoned the child to the Sentinels had she not proved useful. Once he discovered her empathic powers - and moreover, her ability to put him to sleep, something his own powers and paranoia about Sentinels made very difficult - he decided she was worth keeping.

He called her Mantis due to her insect-like looks (large, black eyes, and two glowing antennae protruding from her forehead), and basically treated her as a lesser being. Ego never acted parental toward her. Instead, he treated her like a servant, expecting her to work in order to be worthy of his “generosity”. She called him Master, served him faithfully to avoid his wrath, and was grateful for all he provided for her.

Bleak as it sounds, she did her best to be good, and to be content with her lot in life. Food, shelter, and a place to hide were more than many got. But it was a very, very lonely life. The Master mostly ignored her, and there was no one else. It made her feel guilty, but she wished to meet other people. Maybe they’d even like her.

This went on, until the unthinkable happened: they were discovered, captured, and taken prisoner.