Urban Warfare

This is what I get for letting Ridureyu show me stuff from his sidescrolling fighting game just before going to sleep. I was part of a small (maybe 20-30 soldiers) military group trapped in an area overrun by the enemy and waiting to be extracted. The area was in a residential neighborhood in an American town. We were holed up inside a small house, and the enemy had us surrounded. We could see them out there, and were just waiting to be attacked. There were certain ones that we knew to be suicide bombers, and they could set off the bombs with mental commands. For these, instead of normal weapons, we were equipped with poison dart blowguns. The poison was powerful enough to shut down mental capacity instantly so they couldn't make the bomb go off.

One of these bombers was Nina Meiers from 24. When the action started, I saw a guy outside hit her with the poison dart, but it didn't do anything. She shot him, ran inside, got close to a bunch of our soldiers, and blew them (and herself) up. Shortly after this, reports from other soldiers on our side indicated that all the female suicide bombers were immune to the poison. This was bad news for me, because right when this report came in (we got it via some sort of telepathy) I was aiming my blow gun at another female bomber right then. The dart had no effect of course, and then she shot me. I reached up a hand to block the bullet, while thinking how stupid this was, but the bullet actually only hit my hand. It hit the ball joint at the base of my right pointer finger. It hurt really bad and I fell down, but I was still thinking that I would have expected getting shot to hurt more than that. The bomber, standing over me, said, "It's lucky for you, really. You'll just get put on the wounded list and dragged off the battlefield." Then she walked off.

Next thing I knew, someone from our side was standing over me, and telling me that I could go to the field hospital if I wanted, but pointing out that a shot to the hand wasn't really fatal, and I could still shoot with my left hand. He also pointed out that a guy named Jason who I know from college had been shot the day before and had kept fighting. Right about here I woke up.

Capture the Flag

I was playing an outdoor game with a bunch of people I knew from TMC and Pocatello. It had originally been Capture the Flags, but had been modified so that there was just one big flag, with one team guarding it and the other team trying to get to it. The terrain consisted of a small bowl-shaped valley with steep hills all around it, such that the tops of the hills on two sides were inaccessible for some reason. The offensive team would start out on one ridge, and the defensive wherever they wanted aside from that ridge (e.g., on the opposite ridge or down in the valley itself. The flag (a white rag on a long stick) was always somewhere on the opposite ridge. The jail had been eliminated; if a player from the attacking team got tagged, they were out for the rest of that game. For the attacking team to win, it was simply necessary for one of them to touch the flag. For the defending team to win, they just had to tag all the attackers. With these modifications the games went very fast, which I think was the idea. The defenders usually won.

When we were choosing the teams between games, this was done inside a building, in a room with a bunch of folding chairs. I don't remember there being any transition between the playing area and that room; the scene would just shift in the dream. There would be two team captains, but the method used to pick the teams was a bit unusual. They would start out taking turns claiming players, until each had filled up half their team. Then, to divide up the other half of the players, the "divider/chooser" method was employed. One captain would divide the remaining players into two groups (with the requirement that they be equal in size) then the other player would pick which group he or she wanted.

For some reason I ended up on the defensive team in every game. In the last round before I woke up, I very nearly got to the flag. Part of the way around the opposite ridge, there was a thick barrier of sagebrush. The flag had been placed behind this. I was running along one side of the sagebrush, looking for an opening, and someone on the other team was running along the other side, trying to block me. I caught glimpse of the flag and ran straight up towards it, through a narrow opening between bushes, but got tagged as soon as I gained the summit, within a foot of touching the flag pole.