Viridian: The Green Guide

Chapter 49: Hive

Izuku didn't like being famous. It made him paranoid. He ducked his head any time he passed someone, even though he knew that if the videos going around were enough to identify him, the police would have already arrested him. Or tried to. They probably wouldn't be very successful due to the whole no quirk thing, but it would make his mom worried and even though she s aid she didn't want him to be worried about worrying her, he was still worrying about it. What? It was worrying!

Anyway, he was paranoid. Every time someone glanced at him, he was convinced that they were going to come up to him and ask if he was Viridian. Logically, he knew that it probably wouldn't be the end of the world even if he was recognized, but he didn't want to disappoint anyone. From what he'd seen online, everyone thought that Viridian was this bad ass vigilante who went around punching guys three times his size and kept his quirk a mystery to keep villains guessing. He knew it probably wasn't healthy to keep count of the number of youtube theorists that had already made speculation videos about his quirk, so obviously he wasn't paying attention to those.

That number was three, by the way.

The most popular theories Izuku had seen were some sort of speed or analysis quirk, both of which were corroborated by police and hero speculation, which had almost thrown him into a full panic attack when he'd learned about it. Izuku didn't know why it was such a shock to learn that the police had a file on him. It made sense, since he was a vigilante, or acted like one at least, even if he was using a technicality that no one knew about, but he just...he hadn't thought he was important enough to make a file on. Eraserhead would probably be annoyed if he heard Izuku talking like that, something about the problem child not knowing his own worth again or something like that, but then again, Eraser would probably also be angry if he knew what Izuku was planning on doing right now. Oh well, he'd forgive him when it all worked out...hopefully.

The problem with tracking down and capturing a live bee from Queen Bee's swarm was that every time Izuku had seen them so far, the bees were already doing their thing and injecting random people with trigger, so Izuku didn't really have any idea what they did when they weren't injecting people. Where did they hang out? Did they just fly around? Or did queen bee make them as she needed them so that she didn't have to worry about them being discovered while inactive? How did she make them, even?

Izuku was currently working on the assumption that Queen Bee made them with her quirk, rather than by hand, because that seemed standard for most quirks that involved creating other consciousness. The main hero he was using as an example for his theory was Ectoplasm. His clones were made from the ectoplasm his body produced, but they were capable of independent action just like the bees in the swarm were, but that meant there was a limit to the number of clones he could produce at one time.

The bees seemed to function slightly differently from ectoplasm's clones, though, in that there were many more of them, but there was still that theoretical limit that Queen Bee would run into, depending on what she used to make the bees. Whether she used the nutrients in her body, the metals she physically had access to, or even just her body fat or stamina, she would eventually run out, but since the bee he'd examined hadn't poofed into nothingness when it was damaged, Izuku assumed that once a bee was created, it no longer took any input from her quirk to keep it alive. That meant that the smartest option would be to create them in small numbers and store them somewhere until she needed them.

Because the robots looked like bees and seemed to act like them for the most part from what Izuku had seen, it was logical to assume that there had to be some sort of hive where Queen Bee was able to keep the ones that she'd already made when she wasn't using them. Bees were a naturally occuring insect and observers wouldn't actually be able to tell they were quirk created robots unless they looked too closely, so the least suspicious course of action would be to have them out in the open like any other beehive so they could hide in plain sight.