Jon, a.k.a. Mantra
Full name: Jon Carlow
Occupation: Associate with the Greater Pittsburgh Paranormal and Superhuman Crime Department, paranormal sciences assistant
Marital Status: Single
Group Affiliation: The Final Guard, The Rooks (former)
Base of Operations: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
First Appearance: Mantra #1
Height: 6’1″ Weight: 181
Personal Data
Jon was born to a famous superhero family whose prestige was cemented by the heroics of his grandfather, Dylan Griffith, who remained a member of the premier superhero team the Final Guard through most of the ’60s and ’70s. His mother took on the mantle in the early ’80s, but she retired after her marriage to Sam Carlow and her first pregnancy. It was Jon’s only sibling and older brother, Morgan, who eventually adopted the identity of Mantra with his grandfather’s encouragement and against the wishes of his mother.
Sam Carlow had only served as Mantra for less than two years when he was killed in a confrontation with the Pale Duke, a crime lord utilizing modern sorcery. Jon, who had just graduated from high school and had little interest in the cape life, took on the powers and identity of Mantra only to avenge his brother. Battling each other in a burning, derelict apartment complex, Jon hesitated as the Pale Duke began falling through a collapsing floor, costing the supercriminal his life. Horrified by his actions and its consequences but cleared of any charges, Mantra tried to give up the cape life. It was not long, though, before he did agree to join the junior superhero team, the Rooks, a path that eventually led him to follow his grandfather’s footsteps into the Final Guard.
Powers and Weapons
Mantra’s powers are derived from the Mantra gem, a mystic artifact activated through chanting the words Ul dinea, hence the name of the amulet and the alias adopted by those who use it. The gem’s influence can greatly influence a normal human’s reflexes and senses, to a point that an untrained person with average athletic abilities can hold their ground against an expert martial artist and can even dodge bullets. Further the gem offers extensive protection against telepathic and some basic mystic attacks.
Amar Kadingir (formerly the Exile)
Full name: Amar Paragisi Kadingir
Occupation: Assistant professor of Sumerian and Akkadian Studies, former supercriminal and member of the Kadingir royal family
Marital Status: Single
Group Affiliation: The Vandals (former)
Base of Operations: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
First Appearance: The Final Guard #370
Height: 5’10” Weight: 164
Personal Data
The day he was born to his parents, Prince Apan and Princess Kulae, Amar Kadingir was declared the heir to the kingdom of Kadingir. This land does not lie anywhere on Earth, but on an Earth-like world in another dimension enirely. There Kadingir, while a small territory, happens to control the location of the interdimensional threshold between what Amar’s people call “the First World” and Earth. Amar’s ancestors, a group of tribes who described themselves as Those From Over The Sea, came from the Middle East during the 23rd century BCE. After centuries of being persecuted and exploited for their inborn psychic powers by the increasingly sophisticated and aggressive societies around them, they had managed to open a hole in space-time and escape to this new world with the help of an exceptionally powerful psychic named Kutalu.
Amar’s parents were in an arranged, political marriage formed to save Kadingir from a feared invasion by a more powerful neighbor, Shamurat. So when Apan genuinely fell in love for the first time with an adventurer from the First World named Sophie Muniz, all thoughts of his wife and son dissolved. As soon as Apan inherited the throne from his father, he married Sophie and divorced Kulae. And when Sophie gave birth to a daughter named Sirtis, it was not long before she was named heir and Amar was left to grow up in obscurity and neglect.
When Apan died after an illness, Amar, emboldened by the support he found among political discontents, struck. Using his telepathic powers, he suppressed most of Sirtis’ memories and left her stranded on the streets of Los Angeles in the care of a couple bribed into pretending she had always been their daughter. Once Sirtis’ telekinetic powers manifested and she caused a public disturbance at a high school, however, her case came to the attention of the Final Guard, who soon learned about Sirtis’ origins and Amar’s part in Sirtis’ amnesia. Crossing over to Kadingir, the Final Guard overthrew Amar’s regime and restored Sirtis to her throne. She saved for her half-brother nearly the same fate he forced on her, exiling him to the First World. Taking on “Exile” as his nom de crime, Amar embraced the life of a supercriminal, hoping that by navigating the dark side of the paranormal and superpowered world that he could find the means to reclaim his heritage. That is, until his disastrous involvement in a military coup set him on quite a different path…
Powers and Weapons
Amar was born with telepathic talents, which enable him to sense other people and read other human beings’ thoughts as well as project his own thoughts into the minds of others. To some degree, he can also directly control the minds of others or make them experience hallucinations, lose consciousness, gain false memories, etc. Extensive childhood training in these powers particularly make him dangerous, although it still requires concentration and effort to disable even a lightly protected mind.
Elizabeth Kildare (formerly the White Witch)
Full name: Elizabeth Kildare
Occupation: Assistant professor of Paranormal and Occult Studies
Marital Status: Single
Group Affiliation: The Rooks (former)
Base of Operations: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
First Appearance: Mantra #8
Height: 6’0″ Weight: 150
Personal Data
Elizabeth was once a high school Honor Roll student with an uncomplicated life when she learned that her father Paul Kildare, the owner of a successful media company, was secretly a supercriminal who went by the alias the Pale Duke. She was dragged into the cape world almost overnight when her father was exposed as a supercriminal and was accidentally killed in a confrontation with his nemesis Mantra (Jon Carlow). At the same time she was forced to deal with the consequences of her father’s actions, Elizabeth discovered that she and her brother both held innate paranormal abilities, resulting from a ritual her father conducted years ago at the time of their conception. Briefly Elizabeth joined the Rooks under the alias of the White Witch. However, dissatisfied with life as a superhero and terrified of the effects the constant use of her powers had on her sanity, Elizabeth chose instead to become a scholar of superhuman and paranormal topics, getting a M.A. and PhD in Paranormal and Occult Studies and becoming a nationally known expert.
Powers and Weapons
Elizabeth is an internationally recognized scholar in Paranormal and Occult Studies with a specialty in modern occult practices. She possesses the ability to force people to experience debilitating hallucinations that were the sum total of their fears for the future. However, the use of her powers seemed to have an adverse effect on her mental health, and she not only gave up being a superhero, but began regularly taking medication to suppress any manifestation of her abilities. Even so, though, Elizabeth still possesses a special “sixth sense” that allows her to detect paranormal energies and even manipulate them to a limited degree without resorting to occult means.
Josephine Manners
Full name: Josephine Manners
Occupation: International law enforcement and investigation agency director
Marital Status: Single
Group Affiliation: None
Base of Operations: New York, New York
First Appearance: The Final Guard #282
Height: 6’2″ Weight: 180
Personal Data
Ironically for the woman who would become the most powerful voice in the entire super and paranormal community, there was a time when Josephine Manners had absolutely no ties to the cape community and lived a mundane life as a beat cop in Brooklyn. Tragedy dragged her into the orbit of that strange, violent world when her husband was murdered by a corrupt vigilante superhero. Finding a few allies, Josephine Manners’ personal vendetta grew into a campaign of revenge against rogue superheroes in New York City, which drew the attention of the United Nations Commission on Paranormal, Extraterrestrial, and Superhuman Affairs. About ten years after starting as a rookie agent for the agency, she had become the agency’s Director. Under her leadership, it turned from being an all but ineffective organization that could barely keep up with the uncertain and always changing realm of extraordinary individuals and events into one of the most influential, respected, and feared agencies in the entire world.
Powers and Weapons
Josephine Manners holds no superpowers and has only a basic occult aptitude, but is still a brilliant hand-to-hand combatant and an expert at handling military hardware and most forms of terrestrial and even some extraterrestrial technology. In addition, she has been extensively trained in espionage and covert operations by both leading government and law enforcement experts as well as underground and criminal authorities.
Sans Pareil
Full name: Saleem Rahal
Occupation: Journalist
Marital Status: Single
Group Affiliation: The Final Guard
Base of Operations: Susah, Tunis
First Appearance: Sans Pareil #1
Height: 6’3″ Weight: 192
Personal Data
In a distant and doomed future, a world war is being fought on a dying Earth between genetically-engineered superhumans. A scientist couple send their child back to the past, hoping at least to secure an actual life for him or at best to actually create enough change in the past to form a new and better timeline. Found in Tunisia by the Rahal family, that child would grow up to become Saleem Rahal, one of the most popular and earnest superheroes in history and a leading member of the world’s premier superhero organization, the Final Guard.
Powers and Weapons
Like all children who underwent the genetic conditioning process known as “Perfection” in his own time, Sans Pareil has natural above-average agility, strength, invulnerability, and intelligence along with heightened senses. However, with his tactile telekinesis, he also possesses the ability to fly and superhuman strength and a limited ability to manipulate objects from a distance.
Athena
Full name: Athena Pallas
Occupation: Goddess of wisdom and honorable warfare
Marital Status: Single
Group Affiliation: The Final Guard
Base of Operations: Athens, Greece, formerly Mytikas
First Appearance: Athena #1
Height: 5’10” Weight: 183
Personal Data
Athena was the unborn daughter of the king of the Greek gods, Zeus, and his first wife, the Titan Metis. Fearing a prophecy that his firstborn child would surpass him and overthrow the Olympian gods much the same way Zeus and his siblings deposed Kronos and the Titans, Zeus tricked the pregnant Metis into turning into a fly and swallowed her. One day, Zeus experienced a severe migraine and was desperate enough to ask the god Hephaistos to cleave open his head with an axe. Out of Zeus’s wound emerged the child of his union with Metis, Athena. Despite the prophecy, Zeus, never the most enlightened divine monarch, did not fear Athena because of her gender and she became the favorite child of Zeus. This favoritism as well as the nature of her divine role made her the chief emissary between the Olympian gods and the humans who inhabited their sphere of influence, the Greek and Latin worlds.
Athena enjoyed this role and initiated many successes in her mission to shepherd Mediterranean civilization, but also several major setbacks. This unique position came to an abrupt end with the assassination of the god Pan in the first century CE, which triggered a series of events that, along with growing discontentment with humanity among various pantheons, culminated in most of the gods who resided in the lands of the Roman Empire withdrawing from the mundane world into their own realms on the borders of the real and the collective unconsciousness.
Athena was content with this self-imposed exile until, on a covert mission on behalf of the Olympiads in the eleventh century CE, she was disgusted with the state of the land she once loved under the collapsing Eastern Roman Empire and defied the wishes of the divine council by staying on Earth. Since a returned pagan god and a woman would not exactly be welcome at the time, Athena traveled the world, intervening where she could in the name of social progress, until she finally revealed her identity when she intervened in the Greek War of Independence. Since the 1930s, she has been a founding member and an off-and-on member of the modern Final Guard.
Powers and Weapons
Athena possesses superhuman strength, agility, and invulnerability. As the goddess of wisdom, she has tremendous intelligence and foresight as well as an uncanny understanding of technology and military tactics. In her function as a goddess, she has some degree of influence over human minds. Also, since her body is divine and immortal, she is immune to toxins and disease and can teleport and manifest almost anywhere on the planet and some extradimensional spaces.
Adu Oginyae
Full name: Kwame Tagoe
Occupation: Chairman of an international non-profit
Marital Status: Single
Group Affiliation: The Final Guard
Base of Operations: Various
First Appearance: Peril Comics #246
Height: 6’5″ Weight: 205
Personal Data
Kwame Tagoe was born the son of a millionaire, Okwan, who profited from providing financial support to terrorist organizations and arms sales to rogue regimes. When his parents and siblings were all assassinated as a result of his father’s illicit activities, a tragedy he was only spared from because he went out to see a movie with friends, the course of Kwame’s life drastically changed direction. Dedicating himself to intense physical and intellectual training, Kwame decided to adopt the mythical identity of Adu Oginyae to announce his intention of bringing about a new world without the kind of corruption and violence his father enabled. A controversial figure no less because his activities interfered with Western interests in the developing world, Sans Pareil’s influence got Adu Oginyae a prominent place in the Final Guard roster.
Powers and Weapons
Abu Oginyae is a more than proficient martial artist and has the physical abilities of a Olympic athlete. At the same time, he is well versed in espionage, technology, and science. In particular, he used the latter skills and the fortune he inherited from his family to design an operational battle suit well-designed for both stealth and combat.
Dr. Luka Bilatz
Full name: Luka Bilatz
Occupation: Scientist, project head
Marital Status: Single
Group Affiliation: None
Base of Operations: The Outside
First Appearance: Manta #150
Height: 5’6″ Weight: 191
Personal Data
The child of a superhero and a supercriminal, Dr. Luka Bilatz was fascinated since he was a teenager with both the paranormal and super-science. Armed with a genius-level IQ, Dr. Bilatz quickly rose through academia and became a scientific advisor for the Final Guard before securing significant private and government funding to establish a research center in an extradimensional space literally outside the universe, which was dubbed “The Outside.” There he launched a comprehensive research project studying the nature of reality in the true final frontier outside our own native space-time continuum along with a side project into how to harness interdimensional and temporal energies to solve the world’s energy problems.
Powers and Weapons
Dr. Luka Bilatz is an expert in both dimensional and quantum physics and the occult, making him a unique pioneer in bridging the two fields. At the same time, he is a mechanical genius, inventing most of the devices he uses in his own research and experiments.
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