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At one point criminals from the local drug cartel captured Sister Maria and the children in order to force Joseph to aid them in fighting law enforcement agencies. In rescuing the hostages Joseph slaughtered their captors. The children, who had grown to love Joseph, were horrified, and he knew he had to leave. Sister Maria told him about the team of mutant adventurers called the X-Men, suggesting that they could help him. Joseph left for the United States to seek them out.

Before contacting the X-Men, Joseph infiltrated a paramilitary anti-mutant group called "Humanity's Last Stand". When the group captured Rogue, Joseph helped free her. Rogue was reluctant to reveal to Joseph who she thought he was, and the two traveled onto New York. They arrived just as Onslaught was attacking the city, and helped fight it. In the course of the battle, Joseph encountered Magneto's children: Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. Both of them were shocked my their father's apparent transformation and his gentle and generous nature. When Onslaught was defeated, with the apparent sacrifice of the Scarlet Witch among many other hero's, Joseph remained with the X-Men.

The X-Men believed Joseph to be an amnesiac Magneto but nonetheless allowed him to join their team, only revealing to him that Magneto had been an evil criminal madman (they neglected to mention the time Magneto spent with the X-Men and New Mutants to him). A subsequent encounter with the Acolytes convinced him that he had indeed been Magneto, though Joseph gained a greater understanding of the events that shaped the mutant terrorist. At one point, Joseph began experiencing Magneto's memories, which greatly worried the team members around him. Despite her constant wavering between Joseph and Gambit and repeated failure to live up top her promises to talk to Joseph about "the man he once was", Joesph fell in love with Rogue. However, she eventually chose Gambit, leaving Joseph at loose ends still questioning who and what he was.

He accepted an offer from Sabra to uncover the truth, and in Israel scientific testing revealed that Joseph was not Magneto, but a "copy": A clone that had been genetically altered. Joseph was subsequently kidnapped from the Israeli base where he was being tested by his creator Astra. Astra revealed that she was a former associate of Magneto's that had parted ways with him over his idealism prior to the Brotherhood Of Evil Mutants going public. She had created Joseph as a means of revenge on Magneto. She had kidnapped the mind-wiped Magneto after the destruction of Avalon by Holocaust, restored his memories (by an unknown method), and created Joseph from his DNA with the important alterations of correcting the instabilities in Magneto's nervous system that caused him to go mad when he wielded too much power and removing Joseph's instinct for self-preservation, thus making Joseph far more reckless and powerful than his unwitting progenitor. However, Magneto proved in the ensuing battle that youth and power was no match for experience and guile, knocking Joseph on the back of the head with an engine block at 500 mph and making his escape. Joseph had fallen into the jungles of Guatemala with no memory of who or what he was.

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