MANTIS

Before she was an Avenger, Mantis believed she was a war orphan who had scraped by on the streets of Saigon. That past was a planted script. She had actually spent her first eighteen years inside a hidden temple in Vietnam, raised and trained by the Priests of Pama, a pacifist sect of the alien Kree who suspected the girl in their care might grow up to be the Celestial Madonna.

On her eighteenth birthday the priests staged the strangest graduation in Marvel history: they wiped her memories of the temple clean, dressed her in ordinary clothes, and left her in the city carrying a fabricated childhood as a homeless orphan. The thinking was that a Madonna should learn ordinary human life from the inside, unshadowed by alien tutors watching her every step.

The erased years had hidden her family along with her schooling. Her father was Gustav Brandt, a German mercenary whose marriage into a Saigon crime family ended with her mother murdered and Brandt himself blinded by fire; he fled with his infant daughter to the priests' temple, where the monks raised the girl while keeping her father apart from her. Brandt later resurfaced inside the criminal Zodiac cartel under a new name: Libra.

When Libra finally told the adult Mantis who he was, she refused to believe a word of it — the false memories the priests had installed felt exactly as solid as genuine ones do. She travelled back to the temple hunting for proof and found the priests all murdered, which settled nothing except how completely her first life had been taken from her twice over.