The Supernatural Experimentation division, or SEX as they demanded to be called as soon as they saw me, were at it again when I got in. It was the first round of Dust experiments, what actually amounted to spending the day sprinkling various types of Dust over Peggy. That must be at least a scientific notch or two above sticking severed body parts together and seeing what will happen, right?
Either way, even they were bored with it. They couldn't try any invasive experiments yet, not until Peggy was nearing the end of her time in our lab. That's how they found the time to notify me of their acronym, and ask that I distribute a memo to alert everyone else. I took the more interesting route and made the memo into a short pamphlet entitled "Talking to your scientists about SEX".
After laying those out on the desks and pinning a couple to the bulletin board, I went right to my own desk to take a look at the notes I'd made. They were all terrible. Wonderfully, gloriously terrible. Each was a round-trip on an all-expenses-paid mini-vacation. It didn't matter where they might lead me, they only had to waste some time, and first on the list…. Avian Faunus. That was actually just an error on my part, what it really meant was winged Faunus- specifically ones that could fly. An easy concept to refute.
Firstly, It was based on other material. There wasn't really any consideration given to the logic of Humans with wings on their backs. The premise worked fine for the Supernatural, but the natural? Faunus all have an animal trait, and I don't know of any birds with wings on their backs, do you? Some of the crappy fanfiction even tried to pull it with bats, bats. With birds at least the mistake made sense; it can be unusual to think of wings as limbs, but bats have goddamn hands at their end of their wings. Why on Remnant would a bat, or any other avian Faunus' wings be on their back? If the slightest bit of thought was put into the idea, the wings would at least be along the arms, just like a bat's.
Secondly, it takes more than simple wings to fly. If it didn't, I wouldn't have broken my leg when I was seven years old and jumped off the roof with cardboard taped to my arms. It would take a lot of physiological changes for a Human to be capable of flight. It's not necessarily impossible… But far beyond a simple Faunus trait. The Faunus girl who sat in front of me in third grade got a tail that wagged when she was excited, and some funky-looking eyes. This hypothetical flying Faunus gets numerous, fundamental changes to their entire body's structure and function. Who could think those two sets of traits are on the same level in any way? Why not just google it? Winged Faunus do exist, but none that can fly.
It was a pretty damning argument against flying Faunus… But I hadn't found anything that truly rejected the idea altogether. I'd just found a whole lot of reasons why everyone that attempted it did it wrong. The wings would logically be arm-based rather than on the back, and they couldn't be a product of natural Faunus birth. Theoretically, the second point actually made the first moot. Since they couldn't be natural, they'd have to be engineered... And in that case you could just put the wings on their back. We probably had the materials in the lab here to make a "Faunus" like this ourselves. The DNA of a Faunus with vestigial wings would actually be a great starting point, it could leap the project ahead years from where we'd be starting from scratch. With a few changes to the formula, I had to admit, we could actually bring some bad fanfiction to life. It was a staggering prospect sure to bring thousands of prepubescent ladyboners to life if they just read that headline.
For just a moment, I had a quiet little daydream. I saw myself on TV, on that myth show. The one with the crazy guy and the bereted walrus Faunus who tested all kinds of crazy ideas together. I'd only caught a couple episodes, but it seemed like a cool show.
Then I had to stop and ask myself if it would be worth it. What actual advantages or disadvantages would a flying Faunus have? Flight, obviously, actual flight. Wings aren't exactly conducive to hovering, so any sort of indoor use is totally out of the question. They couldn't wear any but the lightest of armor. The wings would actually make them a much bigger target, too… I wasn't finding much in the way of pros, but plenty of cons. Even fighting midair would be an issue. Marksmanship would be impossible, although I couldn't figure out for sure if automatic fire would have enough recoil to interfere with the flight, so I just put that under "Maybe". Melee fighting might not necessarily be impossible, but it would be very difficult, risky, and would mean moving very predictably. It would be a simple matter to shoot the flier out of the sky while he made his dive, or impale them on a weapon, or just move out of the way. Most of that would remain true even for back-based wings. The only combat applications are probably for first strikes or retreat. The only other applications are for simple travel, where it really would shine I had to admit. If I could cross the kingdom in a few minutes without spending a cent, that would be pretty awesome.
In the end, I decided to mark it as plausible on my notepad, but worthless, and I didn't think any further explanation would be needed. It was head and shoulders above the idea of a Grimm hybrid, but misguided. Driven not by thinking the concepts through, but by wishful thinking and other sources, sources where wishful thinking, and other inspirations were also higher on the priority list. I wouldn't even necessarily say that was a bad thing, just that the fanfiction writers got a bit ahead of themselves. Perhaps I was finding a bit of a burgeoning writing critic in myself, because I didn't see why someone couldn't do what they want, and also have it make sense. A lot of people would probably say I was overthinking it, but I was just thinking it. The ideas fell apart at thought #1, so even #2 would be overthinking it. Why did this fanfiction writer I was inventing in my head seem to reject the idea of a concept that was thought out, and implemented carefully instead of a bunch of slapdash "Just because"? It's not even like one path was inherently better quality. Both can be good, but one way can be good and also make sense.
I must have gotten a little lost in my little internal dialogues again, because I ended up clocking out a little late for the second day in a row. I went to check on Peggy, but there was nothing new. SEX had gone through the entire Dust rainbow, and I tell you, that Boarbatusk looked like she'd been in the middle of a pixie orgy.
Day 5; 5:46 PM - No progress. My personal investigations into side-projects have also begun without a worthy goal.