Mob of the Maroon Magpie
The Mob of the Maroon Magpie was one of the Strangely-Colored Secret Societies of the Prime Universe, made up of genetically-engineered, humanoid magpies.
History
The first two Maroon Magpies were originally a pair of ordinary magpies, who were captured by Professor Scarper and his robot assistant and mutated into anthropomorphic beings in order to be presented to Scarper's First Horde overseers as a proof-of-concept for Scarper's proposal of using mutated animals as operatives. The two magpies also received the names of Doctor Jeckle and Mr Heckle from Scarper, who was a noted enjoyer both of classic science-fiction novels and of classic cartoons. (PROSE: The Salamandyrs and the Automata)
Even after the Horde stopped funding Scarper's experiments, erasing all knowledge of themselves from him or them, Scarper's creations remained compelled to form Strangely-Colored Secret Societies of their own. The magpies followed this pattern, arranging themselves into the Mob of the Maroon Magbie, (PROSE: The Strangely-Colored Secret Societies) under the leadership of Doctor Jeckle and Mr Heckle. Their primary purpose was to steal and hoard miscellaneous items, a hobby which brought them great joy.
Acquiring a H.Q., the Maroon Magpies accumulated a number of stolen properties over the decades, including “a surprising amount of cakes decorated with purple rabbit heads”. They also discovered the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids' “emergency supply warehouse” on the Prime Earth and raided it repeatedly, stealing a great supply of Cupid Arrows. The Crew eventually caught on and ent the Scarlet Wings to investigate. The Scarlet Wings operatives were able to trail the Magpies back to their lair where, after a brief scuffle, they agreed to negotiate over a cup of tea. The Magpies offered to help the Cupids in their romanticising if the Cupids would let them keep stealing more Arrows, as well as store their increasingly large hoard in the Cupid Homeworld.
The Cupid authorities refused to ratify this agreement and attempted to obviate the need for negotiations by increasing the security measures of the Cupid warehouse, with little success. A second Cupid detachment was sent back to the Magpies' H.Q. to romanticise them, but it was found that this only increased their enthusiasm for theft, failing to solve the Cupids' problem. Ultimately, the Cupid Parliament decreed that the Cupids should simply remain neutral towards the Magpies and avoid them altogether. The Magpies solved their storage problem by building a larger warehouse, while the Cupids moved their own hoard of Arrows to some other location unknown to the Magpies. (PROSE: The Mob of the Maroon Magpie)
In their fraudulent additions to their Cupid Fact File, made in 2019, the Faction of the Fooling Fish claimed that they were “the greatest of mysterious organizations, better than those marauding magpies or gangrenous gorillas”. (PROSE: The Faction of the Fooling Fish)
