In the 19th Century, the government of the United Kingdom was facing great changes in the dominion. Beyond the regular insurgencies were the emergence of strange phenomena and even stranger individuals. People who could fly and strange beings from elsewhere were not easily dealt with by the British Armed Forces or the Constabulary. In order to deal with the extraordinary threats, the Prime Minister created the Special Defence Service (SDS).
Because secrecy was the key, all key members of the group were only referred to by a letter, with the leader being referred to as the initial M. One of the first orders of business was to deal with the threat of the Fantome, a mastermind who pretended to be the famous Le Fantôme de l’Opéra from the Paris Opera House. In order to counter this threat, M gathered together a group of strange individuals who would become the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
The League was composed of adventurer Alan Quartermain, nautical crusader Captain Nemo, immortal dilettante Dorian Grey, the vampire Mina Harker, Dr. Henry Jekyll, and his behemoth alter-ego Mr. Edward Hyde, Hawley Griffin the Invisible Man, and American secret agent Tom Sawyer. In their first mission that had to suffer a betrayal by none other than M himself and Dorian Grey. It was revealed that M was Professor James Moriarty who had survived the Reichenbach Falls and was using the Fantom to steal extraordinary artifacts, including those of the SDS and League
The team survived their betrayal and the death of Alan Quartermain, going on to defeat Moriarty and recover his stolen loot. In the years that followed the League would continue to deal with extraordinary threats such as Robur the Conqueror and Xu Wenwu the Mandarin. During the Martian Invasion of 1898, the team was instrumental in turning back the Cydonians but contact was lost and presumed dead.
With the loss of the entire League, the government downsized SDS operations, and the agency had significantly fewer personnel and active agents at its disposal. It still conducted operations throughout the shrinking British Empire, seeking out cases the regular authorities couldn't deal with. Eventually, M was transferred to the newly-formed Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the SDS was made a covert department within its ranks with the same budget restrictions as before.
During the 1960s another crisis would spark the formation of another team, this time code-named The Establishment. It was composed of British superhero The Baron, MI6 agent John Steed and his polymath assistant Emma Peel, the alien trio The Golden, the metahuman alchemist Mr. Pharmacist, the ghost Christopher Truelove and his channeller Bertrand Bulman, and the magically empowered Templar.
The Establishment was rather short-lived, falling in battle to another alien threat. In the aftermath, the latest M shut down the SDS in favor of his other project, the exceptional but unpowered 00 Section also within MI6. What remained of the department was spun off into a worse funded agency called MI13. While their mandate was to investigate the paranormal, in practice they were shut out by their rivals in MI5 and MI6.
In 2021 in order to counteract the influence by groups such as Checkmate and Stormwatch, MI13 joined an alliance with the American Office of Nation Emergency, the French Le Bureau Discret, and dozens of other special agencies around the world. This combined-intelligence network would eventually be sanctioned by the United Nations and coalesce into the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division (S.H.I.E.L.D).
After the Apokolips Invasion, the British branch of S.H.I.E.L.D. established a group the code-named Excalibur, composed of the newly-empowered Captain Britain, his metamorphic wife Meggan, his metahuman sister Psylocke, sonically-powered Banshee, Jon the Skrull, unaging warrior the Shining Knight, special agent Pete Wisdom, and the Joseph Chapman the latest super-solder Union Jack. Excalibur was folded into the Global Avengers Initiative in early 2022.
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