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Introduction
The small, rocky outcrop that was known as Muir Island, off the coast of Scotland, had come into the proud possession of Dr. Moira MacTaggert, world-renown medical researcher, when she inherited all the Kinross property from her father. Soon thereafter, she had established a small private laboratory at her family's ancestral home, which had grown over the years into a sprawling complex of buildings known as the Muir Island Research Centre. From there she took a leading, if somewhat secretive, role in investigating the phenomenology and implications of human mutation.
In more recent years, the island had also become the headquarters of the British superhero group named Excalibur, a group that, while composed mostly of mutants, welcomed nonmutant members as well. They'd started out living and working in England, but eventually moved to Scotland for a variety of reasons.
An eclectic group, the team was currently led by the swashbuckling German teleporter, Kurt Wagner, one of the founding members. Blue-furred and yellow-eyed, with only three digits on hands and feet and a pointed, prehensile tail, his demonic appearance was quickly forgotten by anyone who came in contact with his warm, outgoing personality, which Kurt very consciously and deliberately modelled on his idol, Errol Flynn.
His lover, the sorceress Amanda Sefton, had taken the codename Daytripper in deliberate, tongue-in-cheek contraposition to Wagner's chosen nom-de-guerre of Nightcrawler. Retaining both her sense of humor and her sense of proportion, Amanda was not yet a permanent member of the team, preferring to maintain contact with the realities of the greater world outside by continuing her regular work as a flight attendant.
Brian Braddock, who had been Captain Britain, claimed retirement now except in times of need, and preferred to function as the physicist he'd originally trained to be, before the great and mythical Merlin had made him Britain's protector. He supported the team with his family fortune and technical skills as much as with his powers of strength and flight. His long-time fiancee, the delicate blonde elemental known only as Meggan, empath and shape-shifter, was the gentlest and kindest member of the team, and the most powerful also.
Rahne Sinclair, the young Scots werewoman called Wolfsbane, had joined the team recently, when she returned to the island to be with Moira MacTaggert, her foster mother and guardian. Another recent addition was the techno-organic being known as Douglock, an alien Phalanx entity who'd been patterned as an amalgam of Rahne's dead friends and teammates Doug Ramsey and the alien being named Warlock; Douglock had successfully broken free from the collective intelligence of his original Phalanx swarm, and was now in the throes of exploring his absorbed humanity.
The international flavor of the group was heightened by Piotr Nicholaievitch Rasputin, the troubled Russian who could transform to the invulnerable organic steel behemoth named Colossus; Katherine "Kitty" Pryde, the intangible Shadowcat who'd grown up an American X-man before bringing her fighting and computer expertise to Excalibur as one of its founding members; and her new lover Pete Wisdom, who'd recently quit his job with British intelligence to join Excalibur and be with his lady.