Master Pandemonium

Background

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Powers and Abilities

Pandemonium’s best known ability is to turn his limbs into demons fighting for him But his limbs are demonically powerful even when still attached to his body and normal-looking.

This reputedly gives Pandemonium consequent superhuman strength. Despite being super-strong, Pandemonium rarely mixes it up up close – he chiefly works through minions.

He appears to be immortal and indestructible, at least until he recovers his whole soul.

Miscellaneous powers

Pandemonium can also breathe fire from his mouth – and this flame is a chiefly an infernal manifestation, able to burn, char and melt people and material that would resist nearly any earthly flame. It could, for instance, melt even Iron Man’s force-field-reinforced, highly-advanced alloy armour.

Pandemonium can also fly around or shoot big power bolts from his hands (or from where his hands would be, if he does not have arms at this point). These powers are mostly used for close-range self-defense or to gain tactical advantage (such as covering a retreat by toppling a building with a powerful energy discharge). Pandemonium lacks accuracy, and he knows it.

The rest of Pandemonium’s body isn’t really human. He’s able to withstand a lot of damage (he wasn’t affected by the Vision phasing his hand through), and grappling him was described as trying to wrestling a mass of ropes.

Generally, those miscellaneous Powers seem to only function correctly on Earth. They are weakened or inoperative in other dimensions and on other worlds. I’d assume that this is an expression of a common mystical rule that makes demons more powerful on their home turf – in Pandemonium’s case, Earth.

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Other assets

An unusual tactic Pandemonium uses from time to time is to let an incoming attack “hit” him in the hole of his abdomen. This is not difficult, since it’s about his centre of gravity. It’s a fairly large hole, so even Mockingbird’s foot or the Thing’s fist could pass through.

One would imagine that this would give Master Pandemonium a superior position to wrestle. But somehow it doesn’t work, as his opponents never had much trouble disengaging their trapped limb.

Pandemonium has at times built up considerable financial reserves through theft, violence and extortion. In DC Heroes RPG terms his is what is reflected in his Wealth and Headquarters. He’s been known to stop maintaining it and slip into poverty at times, but can rebuild his financial resources with enough time, effort and spilled blood. He has the necessary experience.

For an in-depth discussion of the complex and varrying abilities of Pandemonium, see the game stats section.

History

Martin Preston was a Hollywood star. He enjoyed all the perks his wealth, status and fame brought him. He was apparently contracted with Anvil Studios, which Hawkeye described as being specialists in horror movies (presumably a joke about Hammer Horror ).

Though in his early 50s, he didn’t look a day over 40, contributing to his success and 27-year long career in the silver screen. However, one day, while driving his Jaguar too fast and drinking too much in what I assume was Laurel Canyon, he crashed his car down a ravine.

(The year of this accident is not given, but Preston is depicted as wearing clothing that seemed to belong to the 1950s or 1960s in the flashback. However, with the retcon  of the soul fragments being Mephisto’s, the car crash necessarily took place in late 1985).

Preston survived the crash and felt elated by the experience. That was when he realised that his right arm has been severed. Traumatised by this loss and trapped within the crushed car, he entered a state of shock. Preston yelled incoherently until somebody came. As it turned out, that somebody was the arch-devil Mephisto.

Shout at the Devil

Half-delirious, Preston promised everything to have his arm and his life back, and the amused demon accepted. Summoning a minor demon, Mephisto ripped the thing’s arm off with his bare hands. He then mystically grafted it on Preston by pressing it against the man’s stump.

As Preston started losing consciousness, Mephisto decided that it was all pretty cool. He destroyed Preston’s other limbs to also replace them with demonic limbs. He then got creative with Preston’s soul, since the standard fare was getting boring.

When Preston woke up, he at first thought that it all had been a really bad nightmare. But Mephisto appeared, taking control of his arms (which, though they looked normal, were now demons). Mephisto also showed Preston a star-shaped, clean-cut hole through the actor’s abdomen.

Shattered soul

The devil explained that it symbolised Preston’s soul. He said that the actor’s soul had been taken away, split into five pieces, and distributed to five demons located in different parts of reality. Mephisto then announced that, in the course of recovering the pieces of his soul, Preston would be forced to commit unspeakable acts and become a grand villain. He then left, laughing.

Everything Mephisto said was, of course, a lie.

The five fragments, were, actually, small parts of Mephisto’s own soul. They had been scattered not long before when Franklin Richards blew Mephisto away. Not only did Franklin destroy Mephisto’s body, which was simple to regenerate, but he also managed to shatter bits of his soul away.

Not wishing to recover the fragments himself (and curiously evasive as to the reasons behind this choice), Mephisto used Preston and fed him his story.

The charmless man

Preston desperately started looking for “his” soul. It is difficult to estimate when this started, but Preston stated that he had committed many foul deeds to finance his quest and gain information. Yet the soul fragments remained elusive and he couldn’t find even one.

At some point, he took the name Pandemonium (“abode of all demons”) and designed and/or acquired a super-villain-like costume.

Most of his efforts remain undocumented. But apparently he roamed far and wide and it wasn’t pretty. He ended up buying the buildings of Anvil Studio (his former studio, which apparently went out of business) somewhen between 1976 and 1986. He ventured at least once to the underworld where the Cat People had ended up, making enemies out of them.

This near-demonic offshoot of the Cat People wasn’t the only faction he angered by his deeds. There seems to be a long list of demons, supernatural powers and otherdimensional beings who consider Pandemonium as their enemy due to previous clashes.

Pájaro de fuego

In 1986, Pandemonium thought that he had located one of the Five. He had just heard about beginner New Mexico heroine Firebird, and invaded her home to determine whether she held a soul fragment. Azmodeus, one of Pandemonium’s demons, found out that she wasn’t one of the Five after all. Pandemonium departed after manhandling her.

Shocked, Firebird flew to L.A. to gain support from the West Coast Avengers. Pandemonium followed, and ended up fighting the Avengers, plus the visiting Thing. This did not get him closer to his goal either, and he retreated.

Pandemonium then arranged for the demon Riglevio to run surveillance on Firebird. This accidentally led to an attack on the West Coast Avengers by the super-heroic quasi-group the Texas Rangers, who thought that Riglevio was their associate Shooting Star. At the conclusion of the fray, Shooting Star was revealed as being a demon and interrogated.

After unmasking Riglevio, Tigra suggested that Master Pandemonium was probably responsible. The Avengers agreed to track Pandemonium down. Unbeknownst to the rest of the team, though, Tigra had an agenda – the King of the Cat People had requested that she kill Pandemonium, an avowed enemy of their people, to prove herself.

Wackos

Mockingbird decided that she would pass herself for Riglevio-as-Shooting Star. She went to Riglevio’s next meeting with Pandemonium, wearing a transponder. Though there were some close calls the plan worked, and the Avengers West Coast found Pandemonium within the seemingly abandoned Anvil Studios.

Pandemonium countered their arrival with some powerful traps and mystically indestructible walls. However, he was unexpectedly beat up by Mockingbird when she dropped her cover. Mockingbird had Pandemonium down, but Tigra then sneaked in and knocked Mockingbird out to kill Pandemonium without witnesses.

However, she was too uncertain about actually killing someone. Thus, Pandemonium managed to flee again.

Fragments

Not long after that episode, Azmodeus gathered intelligence about the demon Allatou, whom he thought might be one of the Five. He soon detected Allatou entering the Earth Dimension, and Azmodeus and his master left to confront it.

When Pandemonium reached Allatou, he discovered the reason the demon was on Earth was because of a conflict with the Avengers West Coast. After fighting both parties, Allatou captured Greer Nelson and Henry Pym and retreated to its home turf. Both the Avengers and Pandemonium pursued by different means, but they arrived nigh-simultaneously.

Pandemonium attacked both Allatou and its demons, and the Avengers. Allatou managed to repel all invaders by dropping them atop a boat navigating the “River of Death”, trapping them together.

Pandemonium and the Avengers ended up in the realm of the Cat People, where Pandemonium immediately sensed that one of his soul fragments was. He was right – the Cat People had apparently been given one of the soul fragments by Mephisto some time back.

(How this reconciles with the revelation that those were actually lost fragments of Mephisto’s soul is unknown. But then it seems that Mephisto wasn’t telling the truth about those fragments either).

Escape from the Cat People

The Cat People captured, tortured and incapacitated Pandemonium, and offered him to Tigra to kill. Tigra refused.  In the ensuing chaos and fights, Pandemonium escaped, recovered his limb-demons, grabbed the missing fragment and fled. He apparently lost the Amulet of Azmodeus in the fray, though.

As it turned out, the mystical river he dove into to flee took him back to Dimension-616 . But he was 36 light-years from home, on the fourth planet orbiting Arcturus.

He was not the first Earth person to visit, as Dr. Michael Morbius had been there years before. However, the allies Morbius had found back then were gone. Thus, Pandemonium was right stranded on another world.

After an unclear duration (perhaps two years), the FF ended up on the Arcturan world and encountered Pandemonium. The flame of the Human Torch was soon detected by a nearby spaceship, and a way out presented itself when the Comet Man and his friend Max landed to greet the FF.

Max returned the stranded parties to Earth, and Pandemonium left, flying at great speed toward his Earth hideout.

Taking soul candy from babies

Soon after returning, Pandemonium apparently followed yet another lead that turned out to be bad. As a result, he got trapped in one of Mephisto’s Hells. From one of his comments, it would seem that he was trapped there for several subjective years, though less than two years (publication time) elapsed on Earth.

By the time he returned, though, he established himself again the Anvil Studios. These were apparently renovated and had some staff (at least a receptionist).

Through unrevealed means, Pandemonium determined that two more soul fragments were the children of the Scarlet Witch (Wanda Maximoff) and the Vision, Thomas and William. He managed to kidnap them and absorb them.

Curiously the two children manifested as his new arms, in a strange merged arm/baby shape. Those also considerably boosted his power, and allowed Pandemonium to defeat the Avengers.

Auntie Agatha to the rescue once again

Thankfully, the great if aged witch Agatha Harkness was monitoring the situation. She also deduced the true nature of the soul fragments Pandemonium sought. Furthermore, Ms. Harkness deduced the true nature of Thomas and William. The Scarlet Witch had had an hysterical pregnancy  and unconsciously fetched two bodiless souls to hex embryos into existence within her womb.

Somehow, Agatha Harkness swiftly located the two missing soul fragments, and had the original Human Torch bring them to Pandemonium. When Pandemonium greedily shoved the last two fragments into the hole in his belly, he realised that at the centre was still a hole. He physically collapsed into himself and into the hole, as planned all along by Mephisto.

As damage control, Harkness then destroyed the memories about the pseudo-children within the Scarlet Witch. She thought was the only way to prevent her former pupil from going insane, given Wanda’s so-so mental health.

From Hell

As to the hapless Preston, he was sucked into one of Mephisto’s Hells. There he was tormented for years, at the hands of the Rakasha demons he once commanded. Pandemonium himself ended completely warped by the ordeal, especially physically. He now resembled a demon himself.

During his torment, he had a number of vision of Lore, an extradimensional Nexus Being. Lore was on a campaign to destroy the Nexus Beings in other dimensions – women who strongly resembled her physically, and had a variety of mystical abilities ; women such as the Scarlet Witch.

Lore had just set her sights on Dimension-616, and it is very likely that she freed Pandemonium from his hell just to use him as a disposable weapon against the Witch.

During his ordeal, Preston had become romantically obsessed about the Scarlet Witch, in an obviously psychotic way. Pandemonium further reasoned that they shared a deep bond since they had been both linked with the Thomas and William todler-like constructs.

Furthermore, he had been fed visions by “the Lady” (his name for Lore) that laid out a clear scenario for him to follow and to have Wanda Maximoff.

In particular, he knew that he had to establish a base in the arcane library below Unity, New England. This is the sole Earth site known to have literature pertaining to the obscure subject of Nexus Beings.

Demon stalker

Pandemonium sent a large group of demons to attack Avengers Compound. These attackers were repulsed, but the Scarlet Witch fell into a trap. Somebody she thought was Agatha Harkness told her they had to go to Unity to research the library, and she took the bait (“Agatha” was presumably Lore wearing a mystical disguise).

Once the two women reached Unity, Master Pandemonium started professing his love toward Wanda and hunting her down with demon hordes. “Agatha” conveniently disappeared, and Lore teleported above Avengers Compound, turning the Witch’s team mates into demonic/fantasy versions of themselves.

Lore then teleported those warped Avengers to Unity to join the hunt, before levitating the whole town to float high above the Atlantic so the Witch could not flee.

Pandemonium eventually captured the Witch, thanks to the transmogrified  Avengers. He bound her in the library. According to what “the Lady” had foretold, this would somehow make Wanda Maximoff love him. It, quite obviously, didn’t work, and the real Agatha Harkness came to the rescue. She and her pupil easily defeated Pandemonium, and Lore then manifested.

As the fight between Lore and the Witch raged on, Pandemonium recovered and grabbed the Witch. He had little idea of what was going on, being so diminished and having been fed so many lies. The Witch wiggled her way free of his grip just as Lore summarily blasted them both.

As Pandemonium reeled from the hit, Lore decided to just finish him off. She seemingly destroyed him with a second eldritch  blast.

Infernal hermit

Pandemonium actually survived. He even managed to recover to a degree, physically and psychologically, from his time in Hell. Preston worked to rebuild his body into being almost entirely human (though with an odd pale green glow around the eyes and mouth). He also displayed increased mystical potency and flexibility, having a broader array of spells.

His all-consuming obsession about the Witch was also cured. Still, he continued to regard her with great fondness and to be interested in things having to do with the Witch.

Despite managing all of this, and returning to Earth, Pandemonium no longer had any special goal. He was now old, somewhat broken, and just wanted to be left alone. He squatted in the old house in New Jersey where the Vision and the Scarlet Witch once lived. Preston seemed content to just live as an hermit and watch a pile of ageing VHS tapes of his old movies again and again.

He briefly met with Billy Kaplan and Tommy Shepherd, whom he recognised as two of the soul fragments (which I will definitely not try to explain). After a brief misunderstanding, Preston gave them some odd life advice before they left.

Description

His speech has lots and lots of references to demons and the like. One caption describes his voice as being rasping, at least during the “Classic” stage of the character.

Personality

Apparently, Pandemonium spent a long time rampaging through the dimensions and across dark corners of the Earth. His despair over having become a soulless monster made him exactly that.

How this descent reconciles with the much shorter timetable of Pandemonium having been created after Franklin destroyed Mephisto is unknown. Perhaps Pandemonium operated from a Limbo-like dimension early on, so time went much more slowly for him.

Pandemonium could, and would, do anything to find and recover his soul fragments, no matter what the consequences. His power and indestructibility allowed him to. He was lashing out at any possibility of forcefully recovering his soul, based on whatever patchy information Azmodeus could fetch for him – not matter how vague and erroneous.

A deeper shade of soul

In his early characterisation, Pandemonium was not intrinsically evil. He was in fact a bit reluctant about doing what he had to do to recover his soul. But he ultimately felt that he had no choice and had to play the script Mephisto had broadly written for him.

In his most recent appearance, Pandemonium seemingly had recovered his soul (or accepted he never would, it’s not clear). He was just glad it was all over. All he wanted was solitude and peace.

He apparently felt guilty over everything he had done. He even blamed himself for having contributed to the Witch’s final, disastrous breakdown due to his involvement in the Thomas and William fiasco.

Curiously, the ex-demonic hermit kept referring to himself in the third person, always calling himself “Pandemonium”.

Quotes

“I hate your kind, demon — I hate you with all the ache of my lost soul —!”

“Well, if I must defeat them once and for all, I will ! I hate what fate makes me do — but I will not be stopped !”

“And so my demon-haunted limbs rejoin my living form, and so I leave you — as unfulfilled as I arrived !”

“Curse you with the thousand names, Mephisto !”

By Sébastien Andrivet.

Source of Character: Marvel Universe.

Helper(s): Capita_Senyera, Darci.