The Metal Gear Solid series is a collection of strange games, made stranger through its habit of waffling on whether the goings-on are supernatural or technological. But within this world of ghosts and ghosts-in-the-machine, there's one figure that stands above it all: that "powerful practitioner of psychokinesis and telepathy," Psycho Mantis. The genius of Mantis as a villain is that he gets to rise above the usual cadre of Metal Gear Solid 's half-vampires and nano-solidiers, to see the story for what it is. In a tale that oscillates between the natural and metaphysical, he gets to have it both ways. His supernatural stuff is technology: the system sitting in front of you. Standing distinctly from thousands of phony psychics, Mantis is the real deal, a seer who really can see something the rest of us can't - the parameters of the game. 's turncoat FOXHOUND team, Psycho Mantis seems at first to be one of a menagerie. They all fit a certain pattern - each member of this elite sulky ops unit of the military has a history of emotional strife, and pairs their select proficiencies with an coarse totem that seems to speak to their damaged souls: Sniper Wolf, Vulcan Raven, Decoy Octopus. And like his cohorts, Psycho Mantis has a past fraught with trauma that has transformed him into who he is today - his mother died in childbirth, and after inadvertently learning of his father's loathing for him, his psychic powers ran amok, ablaze down his entire village. Later, working as a psychic profiler for the government, he delved too deeply into the mind of a serial killer, and caught the man's madness like an infection. Now, he is a gaunt, emaciated man, forced to wear a helmet at all times in order to shield himself from other people's minds. The result is a vaguely insectoid figure, part bug and part bugaboo, who floats through the air limply as if snared in a spider's web.