Kig-Yar

The Kig-Yar are a bipedal sauroid species a former client species of the Covenant. A dynamic and highly eclectic species most famed as space-dwelling traders, pirates and migrants, the Kig-Yar are one of the most ubiquitous starfaring species in the Orion Arm. They can be found in various capacities not only in most of the societies that comprised the Covenant, but also increasingly across the outer worlds and crossing regions of the Human Sphere.

Prehistory and rise of civilization
The Kig-Yar have always been sailors and wayfarers; first along Eayn's rivers and seas, then the skies, and finally the expanse of space.

Space age
The Kig-Yar's spacefaring age was largely sparked by private ventures. Their initial motivations for space colonization had a lot to do with not only ideological differences, but also circumventing the laws and regulations of Eayn's governments when it came to corporate activity.

Contact and conversion
The Covenant caught the Kig-Yar at a time of relative interregnum, nearly two centuries past the waning of their last golden age, such as it was. Because of their distributed governing structures (Eayn was divided amongst numerous nation-states, while most of their habitats and colonies were essentially independent), the Kig-Yar never truly presented a unified front against the Covenant. Some states surrendered outright, while others resisted for decades.

The Kig-Yar's lack of a central government caused the Covenant invaders various difficulties. Negotiations with the Covenant proved challenging as the Y'Deio system was filled with thousands of micronations with often fairly impotent governments; when the Covenant asked for representatives to come forth and speak for the species, the Kig-Yar at large were mostly confused as such a notion seemed quite alien to them. The trouble wasn't their lack of a central government, it was that they found it difficult to wrap their heads around the concept of individuals identifying with something as large and abstract as a species as their peer group.

The negotiations were a mess. Every day, more ambassadors from this habitat or that organization would arrive at the Wind From The Rising Sun and ask to be seated. And they all fought each other. A Kig-Yar who claimed to represent a consortium of agricultural habitats would be upstaged by ambassadors from individual habitats who insisted on speaking for themselves, even when they all agreed on policy. Individual corporations insisted on individual representation, which was a shock to the Covenant delegates who were used to dealing with formalized guilds. The Covenant attempted to group the ambassadors into committees by region and class, but those committees would always grind to a halt and restart their work as the Kig-Yar insisted that a new group of ambassadors deserved a seat at the table.

It fell to the Ministry of the Uplifting Word to settle the negotiations and assimilate the Kig-Yar, and quite soon the Minister was at his wits end. There were already too many Kig-Yar ambassadors to handle, and he suspected that different factions were quietly influencing votes by stacking committees with their own supporters. Worse, his security detail quietly informed him that if even one in ten of the Kig-Yar ambassadors were trained soldiers, he and his retinue were hopelessly outnumbered.

And so, the Minister gave the Order of Duodecimation. All of the delegates were gatheree together and informed that they were to select one in twelve of themselves to stay, and the rest would be sent home. Should they be unable to decide, a Sangheili warrior would make the decision for them with a die and a sharp blade. Nearly eleven-twelfths of the delegates were shipped off the Wind From The Rising Sun without much bloodshed, and the reduced committees were sent back to work. This solution worked for not much more than three days. One canny Kig-Yar conceived the idea of ‘freelance representation’, and offered to speak for unrepresented colonies if they paid him a reasonable fee. The idea took off like wildfire, and delegates soon requested more votes for representing more polities.

There was also, of course, the pirate problem. Ministry ships flitted about the Y’Deio system to attend to business, and they were ruthlessly preyed upon by pirates who hid in the thicket of asteroids about that pale star. The ships run by the Ministry were armed and could win a battle one-on-one, but the pirates had the advantage of numbers and dogged persistence. Though they rarely fought to the death, they were not easily fought off, and the sight of a Ministry ship doing battle with one pirate was sure to draw three more out of the thicket.

The Minister of the Uplifting Word was incensed, all the more so when the delegates insisted that the pirates weren’t working together. The pirates could not be traced, and few of the locals seemed ready to call them out. The pirates kept low if the Ministry vessels were accompanied by warships, but there simply weren’t enough warships to go around, and the Minister was loathe to tie down valuable warships with routine Ministry operations.

A year passed by with no solution, until a Kig-Yar named Jhak C'clees approached the Minister with a plan. Jhak was a typical Kig-Yar newsman, which is to say he was a freelance information broker with spies in a thousand habitats. He offered the Minister a package deal: For a fortune, he would bribe, buy out, or assassinate all of the pirates operating in Chu’ot’s anterior trojan. The Minister was skeptical, but played along. Jhak traveled to Eayn and invested the fortune over the course of a month. To everyone’s surprise, pirate activity dropped precipitously, and the Ministry ships were able to visit the region in near safety.

Jhak returned to the Wind From The Rising Sun, and was greeted with acclaim. The Minister proclaimed him an exemplar of the Kig-Yar race, a man who could go out and get things done while everyone else squawked and fretted over trivialities. Could he bring peace to the entire Y’Deio system as he had done to the trojan region? Jhak replied that he could, eventually. He needed time and a great deal of money to build up his spy network, and to take over other news organizations as well. And from there, a long, slow grind to shut the pirates down one by one. It would be the work of a lifetime, but he could get started at once. He was given an even greater fortune, and returned to Eayn to begin his work. He invested it slowly and cautiously, sending daily reports to the Minister. And then one day, he disappeared off the face of the moon. The pirate ships, which had been grounded because someone bought up the entire regional supply of a small but critical engine part, resumed activity with gusto once those parts flooded back onto the black market. The reports to the Minister were proved to be a very elaborate fiction, and neither Jhak nor the fortunes he’d invested were ever found.

To this day, Jhak C’clees is a folk hero in the Y’Deio system, and what he did with the stolen money is a topic of lively speculation.

Even long after a ceasefire had been agreed upon by the majority, scattered resistance continued because there was always some fringe group to be found who didn't agree with the general line. When pressured by their new overlords, the representatives of the Kig-Yar would merely execute their equivalent of a shrug and reiterate that they did not speak for fringe groups.

Many Kig-Yar habitats are mobile, and since gaining access to slipspace travel (either sanctioned by the Covenant or otherwise) numerous habitats have gone interstellar. Some attempted to escape via relativistic travel during or after the war against the Covenant, though most were caught and destroyed. However, over the centuries, there have been cases of Kig-Yar habs going "rogue" or independent and heading off elsewhere; however, most of their mobile, interstellar habitats remain merely in Migrant status, endlessly traveling across the vast expanse of Covenant space as traders and transports.

Anatomy and physiology
"Y'know, the funny thing is, they do actually taste an awful lot like chicken. Whoda thunk, right? Wait, can we cut that?"

- LCPL Ludwik Jarecki, DP3-BAG/3/2

With their distinctly sauroid physiology and even behavior, the Kig-Yar are remarkably similar to Earth's prehistoric carnivorous dinosaurs and their still-surviving relatives. Some xenobiologists have gone so far as to speculate a biological link between the two, which has been a subject of controversy in the scientific community in the years following first contact with the Covenant, as it would mean the first proven occurrence of fully sapient out-of-place biota. These similarities are shared by many samples of Eayn's biology human xenobiologists have been able to study, including the Kig-Yar's several nonsapient or protosapient relatives, which occupy various ecological niches on the moon.

Psychology and traits
The Kig-Yar are a dynamic species who tend to be quite sociable, competitive, resourceful and practical by nature. Their native societies show considerable tendencies for curiosity and innovation, albeit sometimes driven by personal ambition or outright greed. They find themselves most comfortable in small tribal groupings, but are also reasonably individualistic and free-spirited at heart, with this sometimes manifesting as hedonism and most prominently a low regard for governing authority. Due to their pragmatic nature, they are also quite adaptive and can comfortably adjust to changing cultural or social circumstances. Combined with their curiosity, it makes them decent explorers and wayfarers. Because of their sociable character, they prefer to congregate in areas with others of their kind, or other species, and are typically among the first species to be engaged in intercultural integration, often motivated by immediate, pragmatic interests.

Culture and society
One difficulty in trying to pin down Kig-Yar culture is the sheer variety found among the species; for instance, one may find an altogether different social arrangement and set of customs in one community than the next one. Still, some trends can be drawn.

Over the last two millennia, a statistically large portion of the Kig-Yar have come to prefer living atop gravity wells, in artificial worlds, stations and ships, after necessity forced them to extended asteroid-dwelling in their home system and often in the Covenant as well, with garden worlds allocated mostly for the higher castes. Ships, asteroids and other planetoids suit the transitory and restless lifestyles that characterize many of them. Consequently they are perhaps the best, or at least the most innovative and ingenious, in the Covenant at making use of asteroids, mainly in the context of converting them for habitation.

Governance
The Kig-Yar, as a general rule, rarely manifest large governmental units that are both powerful and stable in the long term; the hypothetical notion of a unified Kig-Yar state is considered by many to be an oxymoron. The species' psychology is not innately warlike, but rather centered on interests smaller and more focused than those megascale states would reasonably accommodate. Interestingly, most Kig-Yar societies are rarely larger than a few thousand or even few hundred individuals. This places them within the threshold of comfortable sustainability theorized for human societies, and enables some of their more eccentric social arrangements to work in the long term. Most commonly, Kig-Yar governments tend to settle into a comfortable balance of oft-nominal or representative central authority and "metastable" forms of consensus decision-making, typically via councils of familial leaders and/or other individuals of note.

As well, formal authority or bureaucracy are generally not held in a very high regard among the Kig-Yar; by and large, government is seen more as a necessary evil, sometimes a borderline afterthought, than a serious endeavor. As such, Kig-Yar societies are malleable, highly eclectic, and generally characterized by low state control (sometimes to the point of anarchy) and lack of centralized concentrations of power other than peer groups or corporate entities, which can often be analogous to small states (or, more often, micro-states with disparate privatized governmental functions) in their own right. Networks of accords, consortia, pacts, alliances and mutually-beneficial partnerships, often informal and flexible in nature, often take the place of supranational governing bodies. Thus it can be said that Kig-Yar societies tend to function more like complex webs of interdependence than top-down structures, particularly beyond familial scales.

The Kig-Yar as a whole have historically trended toward matriarchy, and this trend continues to manifest itself in many societies, though it remains at its strongest in the spacefaring strands of the species, particularly kratocratic outlaw communities. Some Kig-Yar style themselves as nobility, such as barons or princes, though often this is done with a tinge of irony. Earnest pathos and grandiosity do not come naturally to the Kig-Yar as a whole, and are indeed seen as a source of endless amusement to them. Some of the most popular forms of Kig-Yar humor are centered around ridiculing the perceived pomposity of the Covenant's Sangheili nobles or San'Shyuum bureaucrats. Governing offices are seen almost like another performance, a mere hat; everyone knows these roles are performative, but they humor the performer as long as they play their part well enough.

Even in faraway concentrations of Kig-Yar habitation, such as Skar-idir or the Otcarro Skerries, one is likely to find a microcosm of Kig-Yar governance everywhere; that is, virtually every form of government imaginable contained in a highly loose, panarchic framework. Every habitat is its own micronation and largely do as they please as long as they avoid causing too much of a fuss; even then, conflicts tend to be low-key and resolved quickly through a complex web of societal processes that seems to almost self-correct itself back to the equilibrium of controlled chaos. Habitats and hab-clusters pick their representatives to the overall governing council of the colony, but these offices are largely token and/or symbolic, and are rarely even desirable postings outside of possible community kudos. When dealing with outsiders, such as nearby Sangheili lordships, however, such representatives tend to hold significantly more power, and consequently become more important to the colony at large.

Perhaps counterintuitively, luck egalitarianism as an ideal and philosophy has a long history among the Kig-Yar. Charity for the disadvantaged, on the part of the government, non-governmental organizations, corporations or even individuals is a staple of many societies, either as an aspiration or a reality. Typically, one's family or community serves as the final fallback point and are expected to care for someone if their hardships are not of their own making. Even in autocracies ruled by monarchs or barons, which have historically characterized some parts of Eayn, said autarchs have been wise to abide by the general rule of charity for the unfortunate, or risk being ousted by an angry mob.

Around the onset of the Kig-Yar's industrial era, there was a global push for the professionalization of government called "Reconstructionism". Kig-Yar governance has historically taken the form of systems of patronage. Rich and influential patrons support their followers through patronage, and their followers reward them with their loyalty. This could be clan elders supporting their families, or senators fighting for their constituents' welfare, or political machines that gave out alms for votes. Since the Reconstructionists blamed this corrupt leadership for the wars and the devastation of the plague, they pushed for the establishment of central governments with professional bureaucracies to administer services like education and welfare.

Whatever their exact system of government, Kig-Yar society - and, indeed, much of their history - is defined as a balancing act between two opposing forces: fierce competition for profit and prestige, and a belief in distributive justice, specifically in regards to circumstances beyond one's control. Failure due to incompetence is given little sympathy, while failure for misfortune is expected to be compensated for. This is also seen as the government's paramount and defining role: beyond that, the government is expected to interfere little in people's lives.

There are places on Eayn and the Y'Deio system where the government is unobtrusive and there to help. There are other places where the government is bloated, bureaucratic, and the rule of law is often subverted by demagogues and mobs. Getting ahead means kowtowing to the right strongman, or wheedling/cheating whatever you can out of the government, or leading a mob on strikes or demonstrations.

Customs
Mainstream Kig-Yar metaculture has long lacked stigmas involving cannibalism. Historically, it has been practiced under times of famine but also ritualistically in the event of the death of a family members, relatives - or enemies. However, it has translated to their (sometimes notorious) habits of eating other sentient beings as well, especially when underfed by the Covenant. Also, because the practice lacks overt taboos around it, some Kig-Yar criminals and pirates make good use of it for the fear factor.

Recreational narcotics are a fixture of many Kig-Yar societies, and assume a ritual significance to some cultures as well.

Reproductive behavior
Courtship rituals and shows of dominance are a staple of Kig-Yar societies, though they have become more understated and ritualized in advanced cultures. Most Kig-Yar cultures have histories with some sort of biologically inbuilt courtship ritual, which are still shared by the species' surviving nonsapient relatives on Eayn. These often include dances to impress a potential mate, shows of feathers/quills, fights between males. One of the fixtures of this behavior, which has later assumed social roles beyond courtship, is Csa'kishi, which is variously translated as "stutter-song" or "song-duel". These are ritualized verbal confrontations involving aggressive and oft-flamboyant posturing between usually male participants. While they sometimes escalate to physical violence, these duels are meant to fulfills a social function of providing a nonviolent solution to otherwise bloody disputes. These occasions are suspected to have played a key role in the Kig-Yar's development of language and sapience, and various types of performances continue to permeate Kig-Yar culture.

Because of the competition inherent to their sexual behavior, Kig-Yar rarely live in communal family arrangements. Marriage to a single mate was likely one of the social advances that enabled the development of higher Kig-Yar civilizations, as in more primitive societies males would be too quarrelsome to cooperate. Many females choose a single mate, but some, especially influential ones, can be polyandrous. However, there is often fighting between the male mates of a dominant female and such arrangements rarely last long. Sexual relations are often casual or at least impermanent.

Because of the Kig-Yar's evolution and mating habits, ostentation and showiness are important - particularly to males - in most of their cultural groups despite their inherent pragmatism. In fact, one of the suspected motivations for the Kig-Yar's evolution of consciousness is the males' increasing creativity in their competitions to attract mates. This also leads to a general perception of flamboyance and opulence as "masculine" traits among Kig-Yar, while muted colors and more subdued behaviors are regarded as "feminine". Since abundant and colorful quill fringes and plumages are generally held to be signs of male virility, males endowed with less impressive plumages often take feather or quill transplants to appear more attractive.

Religion
While now largely stereotyped as mercenary and faithless among the Covenant, Kig-Yar are not universally secular. Religion used to be an integral part of society across Eayn, but after a plague and a war that ravaged the globe at the dawn of the industrial era, religion died out as a widespread phenomenon. It persists today in faith communes and some clans, but most Kig-Yar barely even observe the old traditions. Though most Kig-Yar profess to be atheist, many are superstitious in some way, or have some degree of casual adherence to the Covenant religion; this too greatly depends on their community of origin. Kig-Yar colonies living in proximity to other species such as Sangheili often tended to adopt the latter's customs and culture to some extent, both intentionally and as a result of the natural processes of societal integration.

Kig-Yar religiosity, both now and in the past, often assumes a utilitarian mindset, tending to be more concerned with the here and now than the hereafter. In these often polytheistic religions, specific gods (usually assigned to specific trades or population groups) would be prayed to for good fortune and material profit in the physical world. The metaphysical transcendence preached by the Covenant, along with their rigid ecclesiastical hierarchy, while not entirely unheard of, were regarded as alien by even many of the Kig-Yar who did practice some form of religion. Even since their conversion, those Kig-Yar who did adhere to some form of the Covenant religion would often emphasize the older Pluralist traditions, which highlighted the role of the divine personages of the Forerunners as the patrons of various arts and trades; the Prophets would later attempt to downplay these very traditions as the perceived over-emphasis on individual gods was seen to weaken the Covenant's unity and distract from their overarching mission. Overall, rigid and organized religion is more rare among Kig-Yar than faith in any number of higher powers, and religious beliefs are rarely seen as mutually exclusive. Consequently, syncretic beliefs are also common; for example, it is an old Kig-Yar custom to get on the good side of the "local gods" before doing business with individuals from another culture. Indeed, many native Kig-Yar deities and other spiritual beings would end up becoming syncretized with the Covenant's Forerunner deities, with the Prophets intentionally associating popular Kig-Yar deities with pre-existing or new gods of the Forerunner pantheon to ease the species' conversion and curtail non-Forerunner worship.

One of the more prominent Kig-Yar religions in the ancient past was a now all but extinct system built around the belief that the universe was a simulation, and that one should be aware of this fact in pursuit of a way to rise above its hard-coded limitations.

Warfare and law enforcement
The Kig-Yar's native militaries and law enforcement agencies have historically showed a tendency for informal organization, and large, structured militaries are rare. Such groups typically prefer subterfuge and underhanded tactics to outright battle. Law enforcement agents operating in Eayn's orbital space and across the Y'Deio system have traditionally been given significant latitude and independence to complete their missions in any way they see fit.

Technology
While the Kig-Yar have long ago adopted the Covenant's technological base, their native technology was in many places fairly advanced, and still persists in some parts of the Y'Deio system, particularly after the Covenant's fall.

As a byproduct of their history, the Kig-Yar had fairly well-developed spacefaring technology and space-habitation engineering even centuries prior to their assimilation to the Covenant. While natively spacefaring for centuries prior to contact with the Covenant, the Kig-Yar never developed functioning slipspace travel on their own for several reasons. For one, their societal units were marked by impermanence and flux, especially after they colonized space, and they underwent at least two minor interregnums across their spacefaring era. Second, the Y'Deio system is poor in elements essential for slipspace-based experimentation, including technetium. Their location in space (and time) also meant the Kig-Yar also never experienced natural phenomena which could have nudged toward a slipspace breakthrough.

The Kig-Yar had fairly advanced medical technology, including bio- and genetic engineering for environmental adaptation, as well as cybernetics somewhat similar to humanity's neural interfaces. Indeed, many of their species' several subtypes are genetically engineered either for adaptation or aesthetics, but such technologies are now rare or available only to the select few due to their expense.

Various Kig-Yar communities at the time of the Covenant contact did make use of artificial intelligences and various advanced networking technologies, with the Covenant's histories recording what can be assumed to be equivalents to both "dumb" and "smart" AIs as categorized by humans, though the Kig-Yar's native means of categorization were doubtless unique. Covenant historians record encountering "associated intelligence abominations" that have been interpreted as networked post-biological group minds and various types of emergent neural networks. Any examples of Kig-Yar AIs beyond the Covenant's accepted threshold of machine intelligence were painstakingly hunted down (along with their creators) in the years following the Kig-Yar's integration to the Covenant, though examples of the technology are suspected to have survived for some time.

At the time of their first contact with the Covenant, the Kig-Yar's native arsenal is documented to have largely consisted of various firearms, magnetic accelerators, lasers and possibly some forms of particle beam. They made use of gauntlet-mounted shields made of a shock-absorbing weave; these shields were used to great effect in close-quarters melees on space stations, habitats and EVA combat, and would later be adapted into Covenant doctrine in the form of the Kig-Yar's signature arm shields.

Early Kig-Yar ships, and still many of those in their home system, are solar sailers, with elaborate systems of great ultra-thin sails. On planets (including gas giants with breathable layers) they use many different kinds of dirigibles and balloon conveyances; entire cities are suspended on balloons in places. Entire communities known as cloud-jockeys dwell in the upper atmospheres of gas giants, such as Chu'ot or Chiiro, and ride great flux-liners and stormjammers between clusters of balloon platforms often used for fuel mining.

One piece of technology the Kig-Yar did develop was a primitive form of the pinch fusion reactor, which uses shaped gravity wells to spark and sustain a fusion reaction. This is called a "heap", and though it is a simple and energy-efficient design, its maximum output is sharply limited by the ability to vent waste heat. Heaps are often buried at the core of a habitat, where they can double as a point source of artificial gravity. The heap that powers the industry of T'vao generates a gravity field stronger than the strength of gravity at Eayn's surface. The gradient is also steeper, which causes dramatic atmospheric shifts between the habitat levels.

T'vaoans have genetically altered their germline to enhance their strength and agility, as well as to reduce the muscular atrophy from microgravity.