Arcobaleno.
This Verde was a bloody Arcobaleno! The baby-like appearance with an adult's mind, the green pacifier hanging from his tiny neck, everything was there to prove it!
Of course, when the green-haired fake infant arrived on stage and introduced himself, most of the audience had reacted with dismissive outrage at the perceived impersonation. But Verde had only snapped his fingers once, and the most outspoken of the protesters had been immediately arrested by the security and dragged out of the conference room. The tiny scientist had then summarily explained that he suffered from a rare disease that prevented his body from growing normally, before he went into a detailed explanation of a physics theory that Tsuna didn't understand at all. That had served as proof of his identity and had more or less appeased the adult scientists in the room, so the conference started normally.
Of course, the four members of Caeruleus in attendance knew better. When protests had started, they had remained in their seats and watched the scene with disbelief -except for Byakuran, who Tsuna would have sworn was snickering under his breath. Who would have thought they would meet another Arcobaleno in a civilian, perfectly legal convention?
Spanner had only observed the situation with a single raised eyebrow and kept sucking on his lollipop despite the no-food warnings plastered on every exit.
Thankfully, calm eventually returned to the audience and the actual lecture began.
As expected, everything went way over Tsuna's head, but he didn't mind. The looks of fascination and joy on Hayato and Shoichi's faces -as well as Spanner's but he wasn't nearly as close to the blond- was well worth it, as was the amused interest displayed by Byakuran. He could deal with two little hours of boredom to keep his friends happy.
Half an hour went by without a hitch, when suddenly Tsuna's Intuition flared for no reason he could pinpoint. There was a sense of urgency in the warning, so the Sky worriedly looked around the conference room to locate the problem. Try as he might, he couldn't find anything amiss.
That's when he caught Verde's next words. Truthfully, he had zoned out some time ago, when it had become explicitly clear that, try as he might, he would not understand anything of the lecture, but that one sentence rang alarm bells in his mind.
"One such new energy can theoretically be produced by specific humans, which this device has been built to identify."
Now, Tsuna was no scientist, in fact, he was much more inclined towards human sciences and languages than physics or biology, but his instincts were sharp, and that he understood at once.
Flames. Verde was talking about Flames and he was currently waving a device that supposedly showed people who could wield them; despite the fact that Vindice would fall on anyone who outed that secret to the world.
Verde probably assumed that no-one in the room was Flame-active. Flame users were extremely rare, and the overwhelming majority of them were in the Mafia, or other illegal organizations. The odds of there being even one individual with even a modicum of active Flame in the two-hundred or so scientists in the audience were astronomically low, so it was no real risk on his part.
But that was without counting on Tsuna's ridiculous ability to land face first in dangerous or compromising situations.
He shared a glance with Byakuran, who had actually followed the whole lecture so far. From his concerned face, Tsuna understood that the white-haired teen had arrived to the same conclusion as him. Hayato and Shoichi, on the other hand, were so engrossed in the conference that they had not realized the implication of Verde's words.
