Feral Vigil

The Feral Vigil (or the Kougaiji before the Great War, and briefly the Black Talon during the Faunus Rights Revolution) is a reformist radical political organization in Remnant. It should not be confused with the much more sensational and criminally-violent "sister group", the White Fang. While perhaps as insidious and Machiavellian as the Fang, the Vigil carries out the vast majority of its operations unseen, unheard, and unknown. This, they contend, has allowed them to carry out missions and influence the shaping of the planet for centuries since the Feudal Era of Menagerie during the Age of Clans when the first Faunus Warlord Jin-Boh Usagi united the Seven Faunus Tribes and spread into Mistral.

Of Mice and Men
The discovery and activation of Dust during mankind's war against the Grimm had many consequences that would forever echo across time; arguably, one of the greatest of these consequences was the awakening of the Faunus Mutation which revealed to the world that there had been, all this time, two remarkably similar but unarguably unique species sharing the world of Remnant. Unfortunately for the ladder of these two species, the Faunus were far less significant in number, and some of the abilities and enhancements the mutation offered resulted in jealousy and spite in their human counterparts. Consequently, for many long, dark centuries, the majority of Faunus living in Remnant were confined, relocated, or driven back to the island of Menagerie.

During these dark and trying days, the Faunus, embittered and resentful of their lot in life, warred amongst themselves, eventually carving out a small island nation divided between seven ruling clans. These, together known as the Seven Faunus Tribes (or the Nanaraizen) were the Nyaminamo Clan (cats, domestic & feral), the Inuserabasu (dogs, domestic & feral), the Shishigami (deer, elk, moose and other Cervids), the Muurobingi (cows, goats, sheep, antelopes, and other bovids), the Okkotonushi (pigs, boars, warthogs and other suiformes), the Usagishito (rabbits, hares, cottontails and other lagomorophs), and the Hanumon (monkeys ("dry-nosed" primates), Strepsirrhini ("wet-nosed" primates), and tarsiers). At some point, a great Faunus leader named Jin-Boh Usagi emerged from the Usagishito Clan and managed to unite the vast majority of the clans. Over the next few centuries, he would see the Faunus spread northward into Mistral and Westward into Vale and Vacuo.

The Kougaiji
The first mention of the name "Kougaiji" in reference to the Vigil appears in a shipping manifest belonging to a Vacuan merchant fleet dating back approximately two-hundred years before the Great War. At this point in time, the Kougaiji were a well-connected and successfully entrepreneurial group of Faunus families with vested political and trade interests in Vacuo and Mistral. History tells us that at the time, Vale, the seat of Human power, was incredibly hostile toward Faunus in general, and thus the Faunus people often preferred to skirt the continent entirely if it could ever be helped. The manifest, protected by clever ciphers, details the movement and sale of various spices, herbs, tools, oils, medicines, fabrics, foodstuffs, livestock, fragrances, paints and dyes from ports in Vacuo and Mistral into the enemy territory of Vale herself, and the exact cut, bribe or payment that each corrupt official had arranged to accept in return for authorizing each shipment and ensuring the goods got where they were going. What is remarkable is not that illicit trade agreements were being furtively brokered—a commonplace occurrence in Remnant—but exactly how vast, widespread, detailed and intricate the web of corruption, informants, bribes, smugglers and turncoats really was.

Fifty years or so later, the same group of families would found the dynastic and eponymous Kougaiji Bank, a crafty syndicate of money-lenders whose interests were now stratified well beyond mere trade corridors and silk roads. The Kougaiji believed that if the Faunus were ever to truly find their place in the world of Remnant, to do so they would need real political and military power. However, at the time, the Faunus had neither. While the Kougaiji Bank, whose operations were headquartered in Mistral, had seen windfall profits and a terrifyingly swift and decisive consolidation of political power and influence, they were still small potatoes compared to the Schnee Dust Company, the Libria Consortium, and the more recently emergent Atlas Dominion.

Diversification and the Great War
Even before the Great War, the Kougaiji saw great potential in the sale and distribution of weapons, however their leadership realized the futility in trying to go up against arms manufacturers operating on the scale of Atlas. From the Vigil's perspective, Atlas had the monopoly on weapons and munitions production while the Schnee Company maintained an unflinching grasp on the mining and procurement of Dust. From the Kougaiji's perspective, the reality they faced was that they had to become both the ox and the cart at once: manufacture and control new conflicts throughout Remnant that require Dust and weapons and broker trade agreements with the suppliers that Kougaiji merchants alone get to deal directly with the buyers. It was a dastardly scheme, and one that might very well have worked were it not for the hand of Fate intervening.

The Fang Breaks Off
As the Feral Vigil diversified into weapons, arms and Dust trafficking, a number of more militant-minded Kougaiji saw no reason why they themselves should not militarize. It was these individuals who would sow the seeds for what would later lay the groundwork for the White Fang. At the time, their reasoning was that the Faunus would never be trusted and that if they didn't protect themselves, eventually when the Humans grew strong enough, they would confine all the living Faunus back to Menagerie, effectively turning the entire island into one, giant, overcrowded prison. Just 20 years before the Great War, a significant number of Kougaiji elected to form their own group known only as The Claw, but the world was plunged into the darkness of war and death before the concordat could be arranged.

War Never Changes
The plight of the Faunus and the fate of the Feral Vigil was temporarily shelved during the Great War. The insurmountable evil and corruption brought about by the Kougaiji, their allies, and their enemies both had unleashed upon the world a terrible and monstrous war. The suffering and evils witnessed during this dark hour brought forth untold numbers of Grimm who cared little or not at all for the earthly concerns of Faunus and Human alike. The world fell into the blackness of chaos and despair.

In the wake of the Great War, however, it wasn't long before people began to look for someone to blame. Someone to blame for the darkness, the destruction, the loss, the greed, the scandal, the corruption and the fear that had brought the world to the brink of catastrophe. The Faunus, still far fewer in number than their Human brethren, were the obvious target, and for several decades, hostilities between the two weakened, afraid and mistrustful species boiled and festered like a noxious wound until even the most influential, wealthy, powerful and prideful of the Kougaiji were run to ground. The Schnee Dust Company, in league with the governments of Vale and Vacuo alike, orchestrated a dismantling of the Kougaiji Bank almost overnight, and when the dust of the Faunus Rights Revolution forty years after the Great War settled, the Feral Vigil was nowhere to be found. The Faunus had once more been reduced to a litter of shivering, helpless pups.

The Black, The White, and Shades of Grey
It wasn't until the Faunus Rights Revolution that the Kougaiji took on the name The Black Talon to distinguish themselves from their misguided and bloodthirsty brethren, the White Fang. During this time, the Kougaiji all but disappeared. It was not until by complete accident did they reappear again after a series of prominent political and military assassinations took place over a several week period. A team of hunters and huntresses were assembled to ascertain the identity of the killer and track him or her down. This team consisted of Qrow Branwen, Auwyl Tylluan, Lyman Ozpin, and Tukson. These four found the assassin, and using the clever subterfuge of semblance and dust-aided beguilement, coerced a confession which pointed back to the source of his contract. The source turned out to be a middle man who knew little more about the clients themselves than the assassin, but he was able to offer an old, dust-enhanced seal given to him by the employer, the seal of the old Kougaiji Bank.

Activities
Today, the Feral Vigil exists as a hydra group with many different heads each with its own, completely different mission and purpose, but each connected back to a central body of tenets, beliefs, idealogies and convictions. The lower and middle slices of the group have taken the form of a new kind of socio-environmental activism: iconoclastic, uncompromising, discontented with traditional human policies of xenophobia and militarization, and oftentimes illegal. It presupposes a need to reconsider post-modern, widespread ideas of finance, colonialism and philosophy including, but not limited to, capitalism, patriarchy and globalization. The movement is typified by leaderless resistance models which allow different cells to operate locally, independently and autonomously, even when completely cut off from outside assistance or support. Because the Vigil favors discreet tactics, the occasional ecotage, theft, and monkeywrenching are the most commonly employed tactics wherever a point is visibly trying to be made.

The middle-to-upper caste of the Feral Vigil utilizes the sabotage tactics of the cells mentioned above to push an agenda somewhat akin to green syndicalism or eco-syndicalism, a form of anarcho-syndicalism that focuses on the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of a democratic regime of workers' control as a means of effectively resolving issues surrounding Faunus rights and governance as well as territorial issues and matters of Dust control, regulation and 'activation', advocating to understand the logical consequences of free market capitalism, military stockpiling, Dust research and development, and the regime of production for private profit rather than for the satisfaction of human and Faunus needs.

At the top-most level, the Feral Vigil carries out a veritable cornucopia of nefarious and politically-charged activities. These include assassinations (oftentimes through less bloody means such as poisoning, drowning, Dust-assisted suicide frame-ups, and other less painful and harder to trace methods), coercion, extortion, political jockeying, arms and dust brokering, illegal trafficking of food, spice, medicine, drugs or weapons into sanctioned, quarantined, embargoed or politically-hot zones. For these sort of endeavors the Vigil never seeks credit, preferring to lurk in the shadows and pull strings from behind the scenes of Remnant.

Weaponry and Abilities
As one might expect, the Feral Vigil is not known for possessing large amounts of ordinance and munitions nor does it possess nearly a fraction of military might wielded by either the White Fang or Atlas. It does, however, possess a series of agents known as Grimmalkin, which are exquisitely-trained operatives that often travel in pairs and are gifted at a wide variety of weapons, forms of combat, dust-wielding and Grimm extermination. The Grimmalkin was originally an Atlas, humanoid robot prototype that was stolen and modified by Vigil engineers. Its primary uses were to to extract or eliminate VIPs, eliminate biological targets quickly, efficiently, and with the least amount of mess possible. Ultimately, they were originally being designed in secret a hunter/huntress-killing machine; in the hands of the Vigil, however, they were transformed into protectors of important Faunus luminaries worldwide. A Grimmalkin only has a battery life of 72 hours before it ceases to function, one of the greatest and most insurmountable obstacles of the Grimmalkin project. Additionally, they possess no Aura, as they do not have souls.