The 46th Weapon
This is from an interesting dream I had last night:
I dreamt that in this society, every year they had some sort of combat exercise. I was totally perplexed to find out that I had to participate in it, because I had never heard about it before. In the exercise, half of the people had to dress up in orange, with jack o’lantern heads. They would attack the other half of the people, who were defending the city. Defenders would wear their normal clothes but be issued long jumropes, which they could use to set up barriers, or to catch and tie up attackers. Apparently, people put in bids for which side they’d like to be on (most of the jack o’lanterns were men), but if people didn’t choose, they were assigned. I only found out about this when I saw all these people running really fast and carrying jumpropes. Then I was told to visit a particular place, where I was given all the paperwork and my own jumprope, and was told to go join the melee. I ran down the stair really fast to catch up with everybody. (Running down stairs really fast figures in a lot of my dreams.)