MANTIS

Ancient prophecy, kept by the Kree-born Priests of Pama, held that the perfect human woman — the Celestial Madonna — would join with the perfect male of the Cotati, a race of telepathic plant beings, and that their child would be the Celestial Messiah, destined to change the universe. When a newborn star announced the Madonna's time had come, Kang the Conqueror came hunting for her, unsure whether the woman he wanted was Mantis, the Scarlet Witch, or Agatha Harkness.

The answer was Mantis — and the groom was a vegetable. Her lover, the Swordsman, had just died saving her from Kang, so the eldest Cotati on Earth reanimated his body and wore it as the vessel for the wedding. In Giant-Size Avengers Vol. 1 #4 (1975), bride and plant-groom were transformed into energy, their essences merged, and Mantis left Earth with him to conceive the prophesied child.

The union changed her body as well as her marital status. Marvel's own histories note that as she took on plant-like qualities after the merging, her skin developed the green hue she has carried ever since, alongside a suite of new abilities. The Celestial Madonna, quite literally, went green by marrying into the family.

The child arrived and was named Sequoia — Quoi — after the noblest of Earth's trees. Mantis raised him in secret for about a year in Willimantic, Connecticut, living under the name Mandy Celestine and doing ordinary-mother things in extraordinary concealment, until the Cotati returned and took the boy to be raised among his father's people.