They said Peggy got her first armor plates in overnight, and broke from her restraints. No one was hurt, due in no small part to her having no legs, but SEX's experiments were halted for most of the morning while they recaptured the violently wriggling creature and cleaned up. They didn't look too disappointed, since they'd almost run out of ideas. They were so desperate they decided to go a little more scientific and ask some of the chemists for help. They'd be spending to next day or two testing various raw chemicals and elements on her in the effort to discover the Grimm's exact chemical makeup.

I still had nothing to do but supervise… So I went right back to my list and picked item #2, let's see… Half-Faunus. Another poorly-worded topic, my fault. Of course Humans and Faunus can interbreed, there's no discussion there. Some of the scientists here were of mixed lineage, even.

But none of them were foolish enough to try to claim a "Half-Faunus" title, it was redundant. You either have an animal trait or you don't, there is no halfway point. Some people had tried to compare it to races, but there's a spectrum there, a gradient. The child of a couple with different skin tones can be anywhere between the two, but again, there's no halfway point to Faunus. If you had no animal trait and tried claiming Half-Faunus, you'd get looked at like an idiot, because you are, just the same as if you did have one. Do you think the White Fang would look any different upon either a Human or Faunus if they were only halfbloods?

It would make more sense if Faunus were something more different from Humans, but… Faunus are just Humans with a physical animal trait. There's one, single thing setting us apart. Some have minor additional traits, but Faunus genetics don't work like that. It wouldn't be possible to get one trait, like night vision is a famous one, but not the major trait. It's all or nothing.

… Hm. That was a pretty short subject, I had to admit. I didn't even have to do any research. In fact I'm pretty sure this one isn't even worth noting. It was an okay way to waste a couple minutes, but maybe I was already starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel for testable ideas. I checked the next one… Which was definitely a lot better.

I went to check out how things were going around the lab first, though. I had to do at least a little supervision to make it look like I was doing something. The containment unit was still working on Peggy, so SEX and the chemists were just hanging out in the employee lounge. The children and their caretakers were all good, and the Applied Science team was getting so bored that they started a pottery class in the bathrooms. It all looked good to me, or at least as good as anything could be in this multimillion dollar waste of time.

So…. Omni-weapons, was it? Fictional Hunters seemed to get these pretty often, one weapon that can transform into dozens, or hundreds, or any at all. I took a bit of physics in school, and I actually designed a couple transforming weapon mechanisms for a project, so I knew a fair bit about this one, and I suppose it made some sense on some level. If you've ever seen one of the more complex Hunter weapons, it's easy to be mesmerized. Some film franchises like that one with the robots that transformed into cars actually demonstrated this idea very well. Of course it would be an impossibly tall order to actually design and animate something like that, so what actually happens is that the robots turn into a metallic, fractal-ey mess in the transforming periods. It's so you get mesmerized and your brain can't even begin to process what's actually going on, then they don't have to actually design the robots and mechanisms. They don't change from cars to robots, they go from cars, to fractal messes, to robots.

I believe that people were thinking of weapons the same way. Many are still mesmerizing and difficult to keep track of even though their transformations obviously do work, mechanically. People therefore fail to notice that the weapons are made of real, physical moving parts. There's just no way to make a weapon that has that many transformations. I've seen some pretty ridiculous ones, and I think the most I've ever seen for one weapon is five forms. I've seen a couple that technically have more, up to ten I believe... But those weapons were more modular than anything, required a lot of manual work to assemble and rearrange, and a lot of the forms were just slight variations of one another. Some of these weapons I read about claimed to have hundreds of forms, which was BS on so many levels.
Firstly, the weapon itself would take a lifetime to build, given all the research and analysis that would have to go into it.

Secondly, the weapon would be largely redundant. There aren't that many meaningfully different weapons in the entire world. If you actually wanted to give it hundreds of forms, most of them would be multiples of the same weapon, with slight variations. Not even worth the effort at that point, so for the purposes of my research, I'll be assuming the reasonable (but still not realistic) number of transformations to be twenty from this point on

Thirdly, it just wouldn't be effective. Most Hunters make do with 2-4 weapons/transformations, so one who has 20 would be only 10-20% as skilled with any of them. You're either gonna suck with most forms if you play favorites, or suck slightly less with all of them. No weapon that isn't wielded with expert proficiency is going to be of any use in the world of Hunters, so Omni-weapons suck to begin with. Sure, variation and adaptability are great assets, but trying to justify it with that is like trying to bring a level 1 Pikachu to fight a level 20 Wartortle. Sure, he's weak to electricity, but that doesn't really mean shit when the difference in power is so large. I'm fine bringing a knife to a gunfight if they're an inexperienced and awful shot.
I'll admit, though. The concept intrigued me enough that I broke down and read some of the stories to see if they were implemented in ways I might not have expected. They did, but that doesn't mean they were done well. Every instance I could find used it as "Deus-Ex-Machina-in-a-Can". The character runs into a problem? The weapon can change into something that will fix it! Losing a fight? No fear, Omni-Weapon is here! I mean, totally ignoring how logically terrible they are, that's BS on every artistic level too. Every conflict and obstacle is just a button away from being solved! You could chalk that up to stupid Mary Sues, but some of these OCs even interacted with one another in their stories, and those were just pitiful. The asshole with the omni-weapon played the part of that kid on the playground who always tried to pull "Dynamite" in a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors. Nothing about the idea works.

I finished the report ahead of schedule, which was nice. I'd run through my rounds one more time, then head home a little early. SEX had made it through half of the raw elements they planned to test after they recaptured Peggy. No reaction to any of them. The children were still fine, and Applied Sciences was now painting the lovely ashtrays they'd made.

Day 6; 5:10 PM- Chemical tests in-progress, yielding no results thus far. My own search also continues similarly.