The Uprising

(Inspired by Transformers: Beast Wars: Uprising)

In this universe, things are immediately different from the outset.

The Grimm are nowhere to be seen. This is a world that has grown up without them, just as they have grown up without Ozpin and Salem.

But it is still a world of bloody evolution.

Remnant has been carved up and broken by an endless series of wars. The planet is broken and decayed. Cities lay shattered and damaged, their people living in ramshackle homes and living on rations and scraps. Entire landscapes have been torn up and left to rot. The echoes of ancient battles litter every corner of the world.

And yet, within this decaying husk of a world, there is life. There is society. There are people. There is peace.

But it is a peace built on oppression.

In this world, the four kingdoms of Atlas, Vacuo, Vale, and Mistral have come together to form a single kingdom that spans across the whole of Remnant and its single moon. Its people, all battered survivors and aging relics, call themselves the Creators of Remnant, for they are the people that created a new age of peace and prosperity for their world, and their leaders, the Creator Council, would be the ones that would shepherd them into that age.

However, what was supposed to be a new, bountiful era for Remnant has become an age of corruption and strife. The Creators, the founders of the new society that governed Remnant and the ones who survived the many wars that have come before, are not kind and knowledgeable as they are supposed to be, but are instead cruel and vindictive. The Creator Council, who are supposed to be the wisest of their kind, are instead petty and corrupt, their ranks filled with opportunists such as Cinder Fall and Jacques Schnee and Arthur Watts and Raven Branwen. Many of the former heroes of the old wars, such as James Ironwood and Leonardo Lionheart, are more than willing to help enforce this corrupt regime so that their world can finally have its long-awaited peace, and those that wish to see a better world come about have been drowned out by the cynicism that fills the hearts of the Creators.

But worse yet, the ranks of the Creators are entirely made up of humans.

And they are all withering away and dying out.

Thanks to advancements in science and technology, the Creators have found ways to prevent death by natural causes, such as disease and age. However, that hasn't stop their bodies from aging and failing, and it has left many of their numbers confined to bed or exoskeletons or even merged into the architecture of buildings to conserve for food and energy. Those that can still move under their own power are looked down upon by those that don't, and in an act of petty jealousy, are confined to a menial class within Creator society.

But there are others that populate Remnant, and they are considered the lowest of the low by the Creators.

The Faunus.

In this universe, when the last battle of the last war was waged, a dirty bomb was set off that covered the world in a noxious toxin. A toxin that sterilised every single human being across the planet. They could not age or die to disease or old age, effectively becoming semi-immortal, but they also could not create more of themselves or bring new life into their world.

At least, not naturally.

In this universe, the Faunus are not people with animal parts, but are instead synthetic people that make up a majority of the population on Remnant. Many characters, such as Nora Valkyrie and Lie Ren and Oscar Pine, are as such Faunus in this world. They are fully able to move around on their own power, do not need as much in the way of food or drink as their human forebearers, and are generally considered to be better genetically than humans themselves.

But most of all... they are able to sire their own children through natural birth.

This leads to the Creators becoming intensely jealous of their synthetic children, and the Faunus are dubbed as the lowest caste within the Creators' new society, considered only good for menial jobs such as labourers, cleaners, and so on. Worse yet, many of the Creators are unable to let go of their past loyalties to their defunct kingdoms, and many Faunus are drafted into war games that are played out as re-enactments of past battles and wars, only the consequences of these games are real, as are the deaths that occur in them. Any Faunus who enter into law enforcement services are given a pass from the Games, but this leads to said law enforcement institutions to become extremely corrupt and ineffective.

But worst of all, the Creators, in an act of spite, put a limit on how many children the Faunus can give birth to, with many Faunus sterilised themselves to make sure that it would be followed, and any other Faunus who have been given permission to 'Breed', as the Creators call it, being heavily monitored in order to control them. Any Faunus who are found with more than the globally permitted amount of children are executed, and their children are taken away to be raised by Creator foster parents, both to mould them into the ideal servants to the Creators and to allow said Creators to experience what it is like to be a parent and to have their own children.

The society that has been birthed on Remnant is a unstable, fascistic nightmare, and all it is waiting for is one person to come and bring it all crashing down.

And that one person arrives in the form of Blake Adel, a Faunus woman who has been employed by her foster mother, Coco Adel - whom is the overseer of the war-games held by the Creators - to help rig the games to having favourable outcomes.

However, soon, she meets a young outcast by the name of Ilia Amitola, who helps to open Blake's eyes to the injustices of the world and tells her to go looking for her birth parents, who Coco had said were muggers who had been killed by other criminals.

So, Blake goes looking for their records, and eventually finds them.

Kali and Ghira Belladonna had given birth to her in secret, in defiance of the global birthing limit... only to have been discovered by the Creator authorities and murdered for it.

Horrified, Blake decides to throw herself in with Ilia and her companion, Adam Taurus, and the three of them raid one of the colosseums that the war-games are being held at to declare their intentions. Blake reveals how the games had been rigged to suit the Creators' interests, reveals the truth about the Faunus birthing programs to the world, and rejects her adopted name of Adel to become Blake Belladonna again.

At her call, many Faunus across the world begin to rise up, forming what they would soon call the White Fang, and the Creators would rally their own forces to oppose them.

War would once again cross over the world, this time between the humans of the Creators and the artificial race that they had helped to bring into the world.

However, as the conflict would begin to drag on, it would become clear that this is not a straightforward war of black and white morality, but one of murky greys and questionable acts that make their perpetrators no better than the people that they fight against.

The Creators themselves are corrupt and decadent... except that only really applies to the main leadership and upper classes of their society, and many humans within the Creators, such as Summer Rose and Taiyang Xiao Long, are actually decent people that are either traumatised by the wars that have come before and the state that they have been reduced to or are simply trying to make the best of their current situation. Some of them, like Glynda Goodwitch and Winter Schnee (and her adopted Faunus sibling Weiss and Whitley Schnee) are even trying to reform the system from within, but are constantly either being blocked by the higherups or interrupted by the violent revolutions that are breaking out across the planet.

The White Fang themselves spend much of their time liberating slaves as they do toppling the Creator regime, but the realities of fighting a guerrilla war against a superior enemy quickly begin to catch up with them, and they find themselves becoming just as bad as their enemies, regularly using weapons of mass destruction or getting civilians killed to secure a victory, developing a disturbing With-Us-Or-Against-Us mentality as they go, acting just as much as violent terrorists as they do a military force. Some, like Velvet Scarlatina, Neon Katt, and Sun Wukong, would end up becoming disgusted by what they are doing and leave, whilst others like Blake and Ilia would become desensitised to the violence and Adam could come to revel in it.

Many other factions would begin to rise up to take advantage of the chaos. Some young Faunus such as Emerald Sustrai and her brother Mercury Black would begin to set up their own criminal empires whilst Creators such as Roman Torchwick and Neopolitan would seek to create their own fiefdoms in the world. Some Creators, such as Qrow Branwen would go so far as to abandon their previous allegiances and become the White Fang's biggest hardline terrorists and hardliners.

Other humans and Faunus would abandon both sides and seek to go their own ways, with the likes of young Faunus Ciel Soleli and Penny Polendina reforming their local police departments into becoming respectable institutions that take care of their local communities, and others such as the Faunus Jaune Arc and his Creator sisters, would team up with other Faunus such as May Zedong and Arslan Altan and Reese Chloris in protecting the innocents that are caught up in the fighting from both sides of the conflict.

And then, there are those like Ruby Rose and Yang Xiao Long and Pyrrha Nikos who are simply caught up in the chaos of the war and are trying to survive it, being forced to make harsher and tougher decisions that will dirty their souls until the day that they die.

But in the background, the Creator Council are currently preparing themselves to bring about the birth of a new species, one that would render their old children obsolete...

They would call them the Creatures of Grimm.

If any of you have read Beast Wars: Uprising, you can tell just how much I am taking inspiration from that particular part of the Transformers lore with this idea.

Except for the whole theme of birth that's going through this. That one was something that I came up with by myself.