Iceland

“Prime Minister Siguroardottir, the economic forecasts have been completed and I’m afraid that the news isn’t good.”

Johanna stood, her back to her trusted aide, staring blankly out the window at the cliffsides near her offices. She was drained, used up, and it seemed like the news, since the economic collapse, was always bad, and always getting worse.

Why? Why hadn’t her predecessor stopped their national banks taking part in mortgage-backed derivative trading? It’d never been anything more than a shell game, that much had been obvious for at least five years, to anyone who’d bothered to examine it closely. And when the market collapsed it’d left her beautiful nation on the brink of bankruptcy, and each day it seemed more likely it’d tip over that brink.

“What, Matthias?” She asked quietly, trying to keep her voice from, “For god’s sake what? What more could possibly be wrong?”

“Due to the IMFs demand that we raise our interest rates, growth has stagnated to the point of almost nothing. Unless we lower the rates, our economy will never recover properly.”

Johanna sighed deeply. “But if we lower them, we’ll lose our IMF aid, and we’ll be right back where we were in 2008. The currency flight will cause untold chaos.”

The aid nodded sorrowfully.

Johanna continued gazing out her window. She felt like she’d aged a decade in the very short time she’d been in office. She’d spent a lifetime doing her best to serve the people of her beloved homeland, only to find herself the head of state at the worst possible time, placed at the helm of the ship moments before it sailed off the abyss.

She’d done all she could to be strong, for such a long time. But she was exhausted, and feared she had nothing left to give. Something inside her snapped that day, and her sadness was replaced by righteous anger. If her country were to vanish into economic oblivion, then before it did she’d stab back at the world from hell’s very heart.

“Matthias?”

“Yes, Prime Minister Siguroardottir?”

“I believe that the time has come for us to do the unthinkable. Prepare the staff to travel to Eyjafjallajokull.”

“Madam Prime Minister, surely you can’t be thinking…”

“Yes, all options have been taken from us, all except lashing out blindly. I didn’t want to be the leader who used our great nations failsafe system, but the time truly has come. To Eyjafjallajokull, Matthias. We have a volcano to set off.”