For Verde, science has always been the most important aspect of his life. He was born for science, lived for science and would probably die for science if he had any say on the matter.
He also never let anything get in the way of his pursuit of knowledge. The Arcobaleno curse was a setback, since he had to adapt his whole labs to his new annoying size, but it didn't stop him (like it had not stopped any of his fellow cursed babies, they were all far too stubborn). Being systematically ridiculed for his appearance whenever he went to any scientific convention never stopped him either; if he wanted to attend, or to host a conference, then he damn well would and just throw out any pesky naysayers.
So of course a small, useless little thing like morals was never going to prevent him from furthering his research.
One of his most significant (and longer-lasting) projects was naturally about the Arcobaleno curse, how it worked and how to hopefully remove it. He had to say that while his knowledge of Flames had greatly increased since he was forced into a baby's body, he was still very far from answering these questions. There was just too little data.
So when he -thoughtlessly, he had to admit- activated his Flame-revealing device and a handful of kids reacted to it, he was over the moon.
You see, active Flame users were almost exclusively adults, or teens that had already started puberty. That meant that their body had to forcefully grow used to their Flames to survive once they awaken them, instead of growing alongside them and being more in tune with them. It affected the structure of their body, yes, but it was in no way comparable to how a the body of a child with active Flames would react.
Despite being adults in mind, the Arcobaleno were babies in body, so they had no comparable data to work with. But at least three of the kids that had shown active Flames were obviously young enough not to have underwent puberty yet, meaning they could give Verde so much new data.
First of all, he had to make sure they all really had Flames, and he had to assess their mastery over them. What better way than to force them into a stressful situation and have them fight their way out? Thankfully for Verde, he always brought with him some of his robot bodyguards, so it was easy to hijack a bus, close the streets around the bus stop without letting the kids know, and then drive them towards one of his lairs, where he could unleash some of his fighting robots on them and observe their reactions.
He had at first programmed his automatons to be weak opponents. No need to damage any of his samples, and even he was not aloof enough to willingly harm children without a valid reason. But the boys had been stronger and more battle-ready than he had expected, and after they managed to behead one of his creations, he remotely upped the other's combat abilities. The whole point of this experiment was to push them to their limits.
The three remaining robots eventually fell, but Verde was satisfied with the results. Two Skies, a Storm and a Sun was much more than he expected. He had already installed spy drones to follow them home so he could set up more experiments on them later, when the brunet Sky looked at the fake tree he was hiding in.
"I know you're here. You can come out now." Stated the boy. And Verde noticed that his eyes were still glowing with his orange Flames. How fascinating.
Scraping his previous plans, the scientist jumped out of his hideout, no need to remain there once he was already discovered.
He heard shocked gasps from three of the boys -the two Skies seemed strangely unsurprised- when they recognized him. Perhaps the automatic search for their backgrounds he had launched earlier would explain why. The results should be sent to him any time now.
