Disclaimer: Avengers, Hunger Games, and all other elements belong to their relevant owners; I merely borrow them to write this story
Feedback: Always a pleasure to receive.
AN: I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge and mourn the loss of Chadwick Boseman, AKA T'Challa/the Black Panther. Be assured that, if all goes according to plan, this series will acknowledge his legacy at some future date, as Wakanda returns to the fold to play its part in the reconstruction of society…
Falling Hope, Rising Threat
Monty had spent a lot of time since he came to the ground wondering if he was just experiencing some crazy drawn-out near-death experience before the dropship blew up and/or they suffocated after Octavia opened the door to a toxic environment, but ironically it was the incredible events of the last few days that had convinced him this was all real.
He might like to think he was fairly bright, even if he'd been caught stealing herbs of all things, but there was no way he had enough imagination to dream up the idea of a whole other civilisation on Earth that had managed to recreate the Avengers…
Running up the stairs to the next level, Monty wasn't sure if he should feel awed or shocked that he'd ended up in this situation, but either way he had a task to do right now and he was going to do what he could to help out. Reaching the level Clarke had indicated was the location of the control room, he quickly left the stairs, only to find himself facing a large green-skinned woman wearing a purple one-piece with similarly-coloured gloves and boots.
"Monty Green?" the woman said in a low, familiar voice.
"Uh… Anya?" Monty looked at the woman uncertainly. "That… that's you?"
"Indeed," the now-confirmed Anya nodded at him with a solemn expression. "I am uncertain of the costume, but I was advised by… Black Widow… that it would be appropriate."
"Right…" Monty nodded as he looked her over again. "You need something that can easily adjust in size when you change, right?"
"That was how it was explained to me."
"OK, good to know…" Monty said tentatively, before he swallowed and looked awkwardly at the large green woman. "Look… I get that this isn't the best time, but I think it needs to be said; I'm… I'm sorry."
"You are sorry?"
"For… what we did to your people during our first weeks on the ground," Bellamy explained, awkwardly scratching the back of his neck. "I mean, I could go on about how most of it was self-defence when you didn't give us a chance to explain what we were doing here, but there were definitely a few times when we made things worse when a bit more faith in your side would have calmed things down…"
"Agreed," Anya said, looking at him with a brief understanding smile. "Both of our tribes have made mistakes in the past; your heda and I are now united within the gonakru of the Avengers, and the mistakes of the past shall remain such."
"Thanks," Monty nodded back at her, before indicating the corridor up ahead. "So… shall we?"
Anya flexed her shoulders with an eager grin on her face as she turned around and led the way down the corridor.
I have a Hulk as a bodyguard, Monty grinned to himself as he walked briskly after his former 'enemy'. Yeah, there is no way I could be making this stuff up…
Even if they were ostensibly allies now, Monty was grateful that Anya wasn't exactly a talkative person as they made their way along the corridor. He appreciated that they were allies now, but it was hard to know how to talk to someone who had basically been an enemy just a few weeks ago, and that was before he started thinking about how she'd just become the member of a near-legendary team of heroes that had somehow been recreated without any of the Ark knowing it.
He was so lost in his own thoughts about the situation that he almost missed the moment when they reached the corridor leading to the main control room. He quickly slowed his own pace to prevent himself walking into the middle of something dangerous, but Anya had walked around the corner before he could tell her what to expect. Monty briefly panicked at the thought, but calmed himself when he heard fists being thrown and distinctly masculine yells of pain, accompanied by the sound of flesh hitting rock, only walking around the corner when everything fell silent. He found Anya standing in the middle of a small circle of fallen guards, broken guns mixed in with the unconscious men.
"Nice," Monty whistled as he looked Anya over in awe.
"They were weak," Anya said nonchalantly, before she turned her attention to the large door that Monty guessed the men had been guarding. "Shall I-?"
"I… think I should open this," Monty clarified. "No offence, but if you break this thing while we're getting in, it's just going to make things… tricky if we have to shut it later."
"A fair point," Anya nodded, as Monty moved past her to open the door to the control room. Taking in the controls, he allowed himself a brief smile as he took in the available technology; this place might have started out as an officially secret government facility, but he wasn't seeing anything in this mountain that was significantly more advanced than anything he'd worked with on the Ark while growing up…
Back in the Asgardian garb that she was rapidly becoming accustomed to as she walked through the corridors to track down any stragglers, Octavia cursed the way everyone down here seemed to keep working against her. She was fine with killing people who were actively trying to kill her, but the idea that there were people in this mountain who were going to die just because they'd been doing their jobs…
She appreciated that Clarke and Mockingjay- how long would it take for her to feel comfortable calling the other girl 'Katniss'?- were doing their best to spare as many as possible, but still…
She was given something else to think about when she walked around a corner and found a familiar figure standing with a group of guards in a manner that made it clear they'd found something worrying.
"Jefferson?" Octavia looked at her first ally among the Mountain Men in apprehension. "What is it?"
Jefferson didn't speak, but just had his men move aside, revealing a gaping hole in a part of the nearest wall. The hole revealed a bunch of pipes that probably connected to plumbing or ventilation, but what really caught Octavia's attention was the glass container had had been worked into the pipes, a digital clock that was reading downwards from 00:31:43, a very familiar crystal inside.
"Oh, crap," Johanna looked apprehensively at the device. "That can't be good."
"OK, I know that crazy doctor said something about setting off bombs before she killed herself but nothing's happened yet and it's been more than her supposed hour deadline," Octavia stated. "I thought the whole point of this damn mountain was that it's the only place they can be safe; why would anyone here deliberately plant bombs inside their own refuge?"
"Weapon of last resort, a way to screw over the people who conquer you, it really doesn't matter," Bellamy said, eyes on the clock. "The problem right now is we've just got a little more than thirty minutes before this goes off."
Octavia reached up to activate her earpiece. "Azure Witch to Mockingjay, I think we have a problem."
"On top of everything else?" Katniss replied, with a tone in her voice that suggested she was used to things going wrong. "What's wrong now?"
"We found part of a failsafe weapon within in a wall of the mountain, and we think it's intended to release more of that gas that mutated Bellamy."
"Plus," Johanna added, "I think we can safely say that nobody would rely on just one of these things in a place this big…"
"Understood," Katniss said. "Raven, could you-?"
"On it," Raven said, followed by rapid footsteps that likely indicated that she was coming to join them before she turned her radio off.
"Right," Katniss aid, followed by the sound from her transmission suddenly escalating. "So, Cage Wallace, care to explain what we're dealing with here?"
"Likely an old failsafe program installed by our original leaders during the initial cataclysm," Wallace replied, with a nonchalance that reinforced why Octavia was coming to hate him.
"Which involved creating a system that would potentially release a mutative gas through this entire mountain?" Clarke said bitterly.
"At that point, the mutative side-effects were less well-documented; from what I remember, the designers were trying to set up a system that they wouldn't have to maintain on a regular basis, which included providing a 'toxin' that would not need to be replaced."
"Like normal poisons have an expiration date?" Bellamy cut in indignantly.
"This was intended as a last-resort weapon; we wanted something that could be fatal whenever it was deployed," Cage explained. "Only a few key members of staff were made aware of the existence of this system-"
"Would that have anything to do with why nobody dismantled it?" Clarke observed.
"And I'm guessing that Tsing was one of those people aware of it these days, which also led to her using it for her little experiments?" Bellamy added, raising his hand and generating a burst of flame to reinforce his point.
"True," Cage conceded.
"Everyone relax; I'm here!" Raven yelled, hurrying up the corridor and moving past the other Avengers to look over the bomb, only for curiosity to be replaced by grim apprehension. "Oh, this isn't good…"
"You can't disarm it?" Bellamy asked.
"Disarming this thing isn't the problem; if President Evil's telling the truth, the problem is that there's no way we can disarm all of them in time," the mechanic observed, indicating a broken tube sticking out of part of the bomb. "I admit that I'm basically self-taught when it comes to explosives, but if I've worked this thing out right, there's some kind of remote trigger system here, and I think we can assume that the other bombs around here are of the same design."
"In other words someone could set these things off whenever they wanted?" Johanna asked. "But what's with the trigger being hooked up to that pipe-?"
"It looks like this thing was linked to the air conditioning system," Raven put in.
"Air-conditioning?" Bellamy repeated in surprise, before his eyes widened. "Oh God… if all of these bombs have the crystals as their power source, they can't be meant to explode; I think that…"
"Gotcha," Johanna nodded, assessing the hole herself before looking back at Raven. "What do you think; something in that bomb-thing goes the equivalent of a subtle 'boom' and then the air con releases the gas throughout the building?"
"That… could make sense," Raven nodded awkwardly. "I mean, they can't exactly want to blow this place up if they're going to keep using the mountain as a base, but if they can set those off to contaminate everyone in here…"
"When Tsing admitted herself that she didn't know how I survived?"
"Where there's one there's more," Johanna shrugged. "Plus, like President Wonky Dick admitted, this thing was designed to be a 'last resort' option."
"Take out the invaders while keeping the mountain intact?"
"The original designers probably reasoned that they would have time to retreat to a select area that they'd designed not to be affected by the blast after setting it off," Clarke observed.
"That's not its purpose," Cage said, once again with that annoying sense of self-satisfaction in his voice. "As I said, this system was created when the designers only knew about the fatal effects of the gas; we only worked out about the mutative side-effects later. The whole point of this system was that the gas would be unleashed only when all hope was lost, wiping out all life within the mountain and then expel it out to further decimate the ones that destroyed humanity's last hope. It's essentially the ultimate form of scorched earth."
"Paranoid bastards…" Katniss muttered.
"Uh… guys?" Monty said, looking anxiously at the computer screen in front of him as he activated his radio, now certain that nobody else was going to have a better idea. "I'm not sure who did it, but those bombs you're talking about? I think someone just sent a signal through the system, the timers are accelerating!"
"Accelerating?" Octavia repeated. "But this one's not showing anything-"
"It must have been disconnected from the rest when you took it out of the wall," Monty said, fingers flying over the keyboard. "I don't know who sent the signal, but I've got bombs priming all over the mountain, and it looks like there's only a few minutes until they all go off."
"OK, so if we just disconnected that one, now that I know what to do-"
"There are way too many bombs around this mountain and we don't have enough people to do it all manually."
"I could come up there to help you find-"
"This is a computer problem, not an engineering problem, Raven; no offence, but it's not really your expertise," Monty cut her off, mind racing over everything he could do in this situation. "Unless you can find a map to every bomb in this place and someone with the necessary mix of strength, speed and tech skills to shut them down in the next few minutes…"
"Not gonna happen, huh?"
"No…" Monty shook his head, before he studied the control panel more carefully. "But maybe…"
"What?" another voice cut in over the radio; Monty was fairly sure that was the Avengers' leader, but he didn't know if he should just call her 'Mockingjay'. "What are you thinking?"
"I can't turn the bombs off from here, but I might be able to redirect the gas once it's released. If I can just get into the air-conditioning systems… ah."
"Ah?" Clarke's voice said. "That doesn't sound good."
"It's not," Monty conceded, studying the screen to be sure he had his facts right. "I could divert the gas somewhere where it can't contaminate the whole mountain, but there aren't that many places here that are that secure. Obviously the quarantine room is on a completely separate system from the rest of the air con, and we've already got the people we want to save in this place secure in the main dining room, so that leaves…"
"So?" Clarke urged him on. "Where does that leave us?"
"Here."
"Here?" Mockingjay repeated. "'Here' as in-?"
"As in the control room I'm in right now," Monty said. "I can set the system to filter the gas release into this room's central air conditioning system once the bombs go off, and then reset the system to disperse the gas into the outer atmosphere once it's dissipated to a point where it can't do anything to anyone."
"OK, that… sounds workable," Clarke said. "I guess you can just set it to-"
"Remote control's not going to work," Monty cut her off. "I need access codes to program that kind of timer into the system, and we don't have time to find them if we want to stop these bombs from killing everyone in here; the only way this is going to work is if I stay in here and trigger the switch myself."
"What?" Mockingjay said.
"Wait a- are you saying you'll need to stay in that room when this gas floods into it?" Bellamy cut in. "That could- that will-!"
"There's no other way to do this," Monty said, feeling a certain solemnity settle over him as he spoke. "We can't let these bombs release that gas, and there's no other way I can set this system to go off on a timer in the time we've got until the bomb goes off."
"You can't-!" a series of voices cried at once before Monty turned off the radio; he didn't want to have to listen to them any more in case they tried to talk him out of this.
"Your knowledge alone is required for this task, but not you yourself," Anya's voice cut into his thoughts. "I am the stronger, and a fast learner; if you tell me-"
"That could be even worse," Monty stopped Anya, looking over at the Grounder leader with a calmness he couldn't believe he could feel in this situation. "I appreciate the offer, but we have no idea how this gas will interact with your body now that you've changed, and gamma radiation was meant to be used as an explosive before it turned out to have all these mutative side-effects; if you're exposed to this stuff, maybe it'd make you literally blow up."
"Which… will kill others here regardless of our actions?" Anya asked.
"Yeah," Monty nodded at her. "I know how to do this, and there's nothing freaky about my biology; just… lock the door behind you and I'll do this."
Anya looked at him with an unreadable expression for a moment, and then she reached out to place a hand on his shoulder; Monty nearly buckled under the sudden weight, but kept standing as he met her gaze.
"Yu gonplei ste odon, Monty kom Skaikru," Anya nodded solemnly at him before she turned around and left the small room. As the door closed behind her, Monty smiled at the sound of the final clang as the lock slid shut on the other side, before he turned back to the control panel and tapped in the relevant controls.
When the gas started to flow into the room, it was frankly a relief; the last thing Monty wanted was to have to spend a torturous few minutes waiting for the system he'd programmed to kill him.
He'd had a rough few months since he got to the ground, but he'd never felt like he was anything more than a side player in a larger crisis; he wouldn't say that he'd done all this for fame, but at least this way he'd go out doing something unquestionably good.
I saved the innocent… I saved the Avengers…
Then the gas came in contact with Monty's skin and all he could do was scream.