Sunflower bomb

The sunflower bomb was an explosive created by Beetee Latier for the rebel plot to disrupt the 50th Hunger Games.

History

After Haymitch Abernathy agreed to join the plan to blow up the 50th Hunger Games arena's water tank and drown its brain, Beetee told him about the bombs that he was building, although Beetee and the other rebels were still working out the details on how to smuggle the materials past security. Being from a mining district, Haymitch had received basic training in dealing with explosives and his flint striker could be used to light the fuse.

Before the interviews, Beetee filled Haymitch in on the final details which amounted to the black cord in Ampert's Tribute token being replaced with the fuse while the blasting cap was hidden in the weave and all of the District 9 tributes now had their sunflower tokens composed of explosive. The tributes themselves were not in on the plan, so Ampert would retrieve one or more the sunflower bombs from their corpses. Beetee began to tell Haymitch about a backup that they had for if Ampert didn't survive, but they were interrupted by Wellie. Beetee had been trying to tell Haymitch that they had secretly replaced the weave of Maysilee Donner's token with a backup fuse and blasting cap. Haymitch suspected that Beetee had help from someone on the inside to smuggle it all past security, likely Gamemakers and Peacekeepers who were rebel sympathizers.

Although all of the District 9 tributes were killed in the Cornucopia bloodbath, Ampert managed to escape with two of the sunflower bombs, one of which was stained with blood. After finding Haymitch, Ampert removed the three tokens under the guise of using his to create a snare and put the bomb together, giving the spare to Haymitch. At around midnight, the two made their way to Sub-A using a mutt portal that Haymitch had earlier found where Haymitch successfully planted the bomb on the water tank. The flood damaged the arena's brain, causing it to malfunction and causing damage, but they failed to stop it completely. In retaliation, the Gamemakers unleashed squirrel mutts to devour Ampert.

On the final morning of the Games, Haymitch discovered that Maysilee's token had a backup fuse to the sunflower bombs. Haymitch decided to use the bomb on the Cornucopia as a symbolic gesture, hoping to stage a showdown with Silka Sharp there and kill her in the explosion as well. However, Silka found and killed Wellie first, leading to a final confrontation where she was killed by her own axe rebounding off of the arena's force field. Close to death from his own wounds, Haymitch decided to use the bomb on the generator, tearing the 60 second fuse so that there was only a few inches on it. Despite the attempts by the Gamemakers to stop him, Haymitch threw the bomb at the generator, presumably destroying it.

Description

Unlike the components used in the District 12 mines, Beetee specifically designed the ones used in his bombs to be safe, both chemically and structurally and the sunflower bombs couldn't be set off unintentionally by the user or anything else. They could only be detonated by being fully assembled and the fuse lit with fire. Beetee made it so that the District 9 tributes' sunflower tokens were composed of explosive, coating them with a shellac that could be dissolved with water and friction, leaving the explosives malleable.

The bombs were created to be exact replicas of the tributes' original sunflower tokens to the point that the little cracks in Kerna's from Panache Barker breaking it looked so convincing that Haymitch Abernathy worried that it hadn't actually been replaced.