Powers and Abilities
Mantis was trained by the Priests of Pama to become a grandmistress of the martial arts, demonstrated as fully capable of defeating opponents as skilled as Captain America. She could also instinctively sense weak points in an opponent and knock out beings as powerful as the thunder god Thor.
She has attained a mastery of meditational disciplines giving her an unusual amount of control over her body, including autonomic functions like heartbeat, bleeding, and breathing, as well as awareness of pain, allowing her to more quickly heal injuries through sheer force of will, and affording almost superhuman reflexes and reactions. She also had psychic empathy, a telepathic power that allowed her to sense the emotions of others.
Mantis gained additional abilities as a result of communion with the Prime Cotati. Her empathic ability enabled her to communicate with the plant-like Cotati and with plant life. To travel in space, Mantis had the ability to separate her physical and astral forms, projecting her consciousness from her body, allowing her to travel interplanetary distances. She also had the ability to transfer her astral form to any place where plant life exists. She could form and inhabit a plant like simulacrum of her human body for herself out of the destination planet's local vegetation. Her fighting skills remained intact, and her empathic abilities were heightened to a superhuman degree and extended to the planet’s flora and biosphere. She could control the vegetation within her vicinity.
During her confrontations with a powerful Thanos clone, she displayed superhuman strength, a talent to simultaneously inhabit multiple simulacrums, and the ability to project strong blasts of energy, but has not been seen using these powers since.
As of her appearance in Annihilation Conquest: Star-Lord, Mantis also appears to have gained telepathic and precognitive abilities, and apparently now labors under a constant awareness of future events. The source of these new powers is as yet unclear. Other powers displayed or referred to during the series were pyrokinesis, mid-range mentat training, and invisibility to the Phalanx.
Read more about this topic: Mantis (Marvel Comics)
Famous quotes containing the words powers and/or abilities:
“Strange and predatory and truly dangerous, car thieves and muggers—they seem to jeopardize all our cherished concepts, even our self-esteem, our property rights, our powers of love, our laws and pleasures. The only relationship we seem to have with them is scorn or bewilderment, but they belong somewhere on the dark prairies of a country that is in the throes of self-discovery.”
—John Cheever (1912–1982)
“Who can measure the advantages that would result if the magnificent abilities of these women could be devoted to the needs of government, society and home, instead of being consumed in the struggle to obtain their birthright of individual freedom? Until this be gained we can never know, we can not even prophesy the capacity and power of women for the uplifting of humanity.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)