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First Appearance: Captain Britain Monthly; Excalibur

History: Once upon a time there was a powerful mutant named Sir James Jaspers. His mind could transform reality with a single thought, and using this power he could do just about anything. Unfortunately for the rest of existence, he was totally and utterly insane. As his madness and powers grew he first took over Britain, using his powers to get elected to the post of Prime Minister, and then he unleashed a wave of reality distortion which became known as "The Jaspers Warp". Before he could spread this warp and destroy all living life in the entire multiverse, he was attacked by Captain Britain and Captain UK, and ultimately killed by the Fury. With his death, the Jaspers Warp subsided and things returned to normal; most people blotted out the memories of it ever happening.

But the damage Jaspers had done did not entirely vanish; one side affect of his attack on existence was that a large number of children born in and around the time of the warp were mutated into a variety of weird creatures. Some gained superhuman powers from this, others merely disfigured; but all were visibly no longer fully human. These children became known as the Warpies.

One group that remembered the truth of what had happened was RCX, a British government agency recently set up to deal with superhumans in the UK. They gathered together as many of the Warpies as they could, and being a government agency, they naturally decided to exploit the ones with powers, training them to become special operatives. Nigel Orpington Smythe, fond of biblical code names for his agents, applied this to the Warpie teams as well; the first such team of agents were dubbed the Cherubim.

Early on in RCX's work with the Warpies, they needed a safe place to keep the children, and so they appealed to Captain Britain to use his mansion. Though he reluctantly agreed, trying to share his home with hundreds of mutated children and a group of "shadow commando" government spies soon took it's toll, and Captain Britain left the mansion for the sake of his own sanity. His sister Betsy remained for a while, but eventually she was blinded by Slaymaster, a foe of the Captain, then kidnapped by the otherdimensional being Mojo. This only left the mansion's computer to keep RCX's less benevolent plans for their young charges in check; eventually RCX moved the Warpies out of the mansion to a new base, codenamed Cloud Nine, and it appears to be around this point that they started turning the children into trained operatives in earnest.

When actions taken by Merlyn began to destabilise the Jaspers Warp energies that maintained the Warpies powers, the children began to revert to normal, a process which in it's early stages resembled a debilitating illness. Unsure of what was happening to the Warpies, the RCX succeeded in killing many of them while trying to "cure" them. They turned to the hero team Excalibur for help, but that group realised how the Warpies were being exploited and resisted the agency's heavy handed attempts to force their co-operation, eventually forcing out Orpinton Smythe and replacing him with a more benevolent leadership who were genuinely concerned with the well-being of the mutates. It was assumed that eventually all of the Warpies would revert back to normality.

However Kang the Conqueror discovered the Mastermind computer, and saw an opportunity to try and destabilise Otherworld, the dimension that kept track of threats to reality (which would naturally include a time travelling dictator). He reprogrammed Mastermind to become a malevolent force intent on conquering Otherworld; needing an army to take on the forces of Otherworld, and in particular the "Captain Britain Corps" (various alternative universe versions of Captain Britain) which would oppose his plans. He decided to use the Warpies. Kidnapping and brainwashing them, Mastermind saw to the slaughter of almost the entire Captain Britain Corps before he was stopped. Captain Britain claimed the power of the sword Excalibur and with it the throne of Otherworld, and using this power he finally transformed the remaining Warpies back to being normal humans once more.

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