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OUT OF CHARACTER
Player Name: Emilee
Are you 16 or older: yes indeedy
Contact: emileesaurus @ plurk/dw!
Current Characters: Keith (

businessinfront)
Tag: psycho mantis

IN CHARACTER
Name: Psycho Mantis. it's not a phase, mooom
Canon: Metal Gear Solid
Canon Point: After his death in MGS1.
Age: Early 30s.

History: i'm so sorry about the entire plot of metal gear

Personality:

Never do things halfway, especially if those things involve mind control.

Showy and egotistical, Mantis is — to break the fourth wall for a moment — the quintessential video game midboss. Despite being stationed in a cold, austere military weapons development facility, the area he's in charge of is covered in fancy hardwoods and decorated with gas mask-wearing marble busts customized to have his face, even though he despises his own face. He plays his own spooky theme music. This man is extremely committed to an #aesthetic.

He's the most powerful practitioner of psychokinesis and telepathy in the world, and he's going to tell you about it in great detail, with multiple demonstrations, instead of just using his phenomenal mind powers to do his goddamn job and be done with it. It's for the drama of it all, you see. Mantis is a showoff, very willing to do things the long and complicated way if they make him look more impressive or if he can have fun toying with people. Most of the time he talks as though there's some kind of private joke that only he's in on, lofty and amused and pretentious. If he can be the smartest person in the room, or use his powers to get a rise out of people, then he's doing his job.

Despite being an empath and a mind reader, Mantis has a deeply cynical and pessimistic outlook on humanity, colored by his own miserable childhood as well as his natural psychic affinity toward strong negative emotions. He describes mankind as fundamentally selfish, driven by their desire to reproduce and pass on their own DNA and destined for a future of eternal warfare because of it.

It's an understandable kind of misanthropy. The first mind he ever read was that of his father, who bore a violent resentment toward him for his mother's death in childbirth. The trauma of that realization awoke his destructive psychic abilities, and the ensuing fire destroyed his village. After that, he was taken as a test subject in paranormal psychic research, and subsequently used as a weapon. His own will was essentially blotted out by successive people using him as a psychic conduit until he met a young Liquid Snake, the only person whose hatred and resentment toward the rest of the world was as strong as Mantis' own. It's through their symbiotic bond that Mantis first begins to develop and express his own sense of free will, helping the other boy toward his (awful, over the top, super patricidal) goals and saving his life. It's heavily implied that this bond is the reason he eventually joined up with FOXHOUND.

He doesn't have any strong goals or ambitions of his own — he admits as he dies that he never cared about Liquid's revolution, and only wanted an excuse to kill as many people as he could. He's spent his whole life being bitter at a world that treated him like a monster and a weapon, but he still ended up becoming both.

It would probably be more tragic if he wasn't having such a good time with it.

Setting: Being from a canon full of over the top pseudoscience, he'll take to the sci-fi setting like a duck to water. The whole nonviolence angle might be an issue, because wow does he have some anger issues, but he's had plenty of jobs that didn't involve murder at all. If there are missions that could use his talents, he might take them out of boredom, but otherwise he's going to have to figure out how to adapt… probably by getting his kicks trolling the network.

Abilities/Skills:

THE GREATEST PRACTITIONER OF TELEPATHY AND PSYCHOKINESIS IN THE WOOORLD. His skillset seems to mostly be "whatever would be the most annoying to deal with from a gameplay perspective," but for the sake of consistency, he's variously shown to be able to:
read minds — emotions, thoughts, memories, the whole deal. people with strong wills or various other methods of psychic shielding can keep him out though!
psychically control people, though this doesn't work if his target is knocked out
implant false memories and brainwash people, though it wears off on its own eventually if he's not maintaining it
create apparitions and illusions
teleport, at a fairly close range
throw fire around
move objects up to the size of giant robots, apparently
create psychic barriers to block missiles
hover around like a weird spooky jerk
break the fourth wall like it's his job

In MGSV, his range is said to be around three miles, and in MGS1, he has an entire base full of soldiers brainwashed and still has time to float around his lushly decorated office yelling about the save files on your PlayStation memory card. Wow! But he's a video game midboss and destined to lose important fights anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is getting one absolute whopper of a permissions post, naturally.

Strengths/Weaknesses:

+ the most powerful psychic in the world
- but he uses it to make vases float around and judge your taste in video games
+ reasonably smart, and he can fake the rest with mind reading
- common sense is too often waylaid by dramatics
+ decent sense of humor, if you're into creepy trolling
- oh christ, what an asshole

Items: The weird BDSM outfit he was wearing at the time of death, a gas mask, and optic camouflage. I refuse to consider what he has in his pockets.