Tuesday, February 23, 2021

JONATHAN TREMONT

 


JONATHAN TREMONT

Real Name: Jonathan Tremont (legally changed, birth name unknown)
First Appearance: Avengers (Vol. 3) #13, February 1999 (in shadows); Avengers (Vol. 3) #15, April 1999 (in full)

Powers: The man who would eventually change his name to ‘Jonathan Tremont’ was originally a baseline human with no superhuman powers.

Growing up in a small village in the foothills of the Himalayas in rural India, there were three brothers. Each brother gained fledgling powers from exposure to energy from an extraterrestrial Trion shard that crashed in the Himalayan mountains. The eldest developed great strength, the middle became supernaturally intelligent, and the youngest (Tremont) developed a gift for oration and the ability to charm others with his words. Before they could fully develop, though, the first two brothers died of an illness which swept the village. Tremont preserved his brothers' souls by housing their spiritual energy inside him as they passed.

As an adult, he had vivid prophetic dreams about the shard hidden in the mountains, but could not locate it himself. Through Hal Chandler (who along with his brother, Chuck, was empowered by another Trion shard in the 1950s as the 3-D Man), Tremont uncovered the shard and mastered it through study and meditation, becoming a superhuman.

Exposure to the energies of the Trion shard during his childhood made him remarkably charismatic and persuasive. Tremont was a gifted orator proficient in the use of advanced technologies, which he used in concert with his superhuman powers. Gaining the shard itself during adulthood, Tremont developed the ability to absorb psionic energy from various sources (primarily from other living beings) and metabolize it to saturate his body with various superhuman powers.

Tremont manifested a number of superhuman powers in the present, not all of which were fully defined. He possessed the power of suggestion, which he could use to influence people's thoughts and actions subtly, either over a distance or in person such as when he gave his speeches for his Triune Understanding group. He manifested different aspects of telepathy, such as the ability to transfer his consciousness to the astral plane for meditation or to commune with his brothers. He could also send the minds of other people into a psychic landscape of their own devising, allowing them to literally face their own psychological problems and issues.

Tremont absorbed power from his followers, feeding off of their psychic energies and devotion to the Triunes. Absorbing too much psychic energy too quickly would harm or even kill his followers. When charged by these energies, he was capable of levitation, size alteration, energy blasts, possibly teleportation and many other feats as well. Chiefly, though, Tremont's most significant ability is the power to summon his deceased brothers, in their more fully developed identities as Pagan (left) and Lord Templar (right), whose powers he could also manifest within himself.

Pagan is a massive physical specimen, normally standing at least 9' tall. He has Class 100 strength, superhuman endurance, reaction time, and is all but impervious to any form of physical injury. Pagan is constantly revitalized by Trion energy, which can increase his size and strength even further if he wills it. He also seemed to absorb different types of energy when exposed to them, reducing the amount of punishment he endured even further.

Lord Templar's primary ability was to summon the Avatars of Templar, energy duplicates which acted as slightly different versions of himself. Among his avatars were ones that were superhumanly strong, superhumanly agile, capable of morphing their hands into sword-like blades, projected high-voltage electricity, energy-siphoning abilities, and becoming intangible. He could summon six different avatars, or six of one type, such as all Avatars of Strength. Templar himself was capable of teleportation, levitated himself constantly, and could produce repulsion energy either as beams from his hands or as a surge of energy blasting out from his body. Whether we saw all his possible avatars or if he also personally possessed all the abilities they did is unknown.

1 comment:

sylar10 said...

Tremont was a power-hungry narcissist who created the Triune Understanding, a pop psychology movement centered on mental/spiritual healing. Gaining more followers gave him more power to combat a threat he saw coming to Earth: The Triple-Evil.

When the Triple-Evil manifested, the universe created three shards of cosmic light to seek out and destroy it. Two ended up on Earth: One empowered the Chandler brothers who became the hero known as the 3-D Man, the other landed in India. An elderly and retired Hal Chandler found the shard in India, which a then-unknown Tremont assaulted and imprisoned Chandler for. When mastering the shard, he learned of its history and the Triple-Evil. So he formed the Triune to amass more power to stop it. He also absorbed some of the Trion energy from Hal Chandler as well, but couldn’t outright usurp or harness its power.

However, he later arranged a process that converted Hal's body completely into energy and transferred all that Trion energy into a member of the Triune Understanding: Disgraced former Olympic triathlete, Delroy Garrett, Jr., giving him the 3-D Man’s powers (and unwittingly the souls of both Chandler brothers) as the superhuman Triune spokesman Triathlon.