Realms Chapter 1: Decision

After many attempts of trying to open my Dad’s locked door, I decided to smash it down. Well, it’s much easier than trying to pick-lock when your hands are so big. The door? I could give an explanation for that later. Dad always locks all his weapons in his room ever since the day I tried to cut a grass. Let’s just say it didn’t go well. Dad’s room was never clean. It had mushrooms growing on the walls and weird black things flying around his room. He called those flies. Anyway I looked around his room. There were just heads of his kills on the wall, nothing else. No table, No bed. NOTHING! He must have hid it. I started to panic. Sweat trickled down my face slowly. My heart started to beat faster and faster. I had to cut my nails! Even I can’t look at them without feeling disgusted. I looked everywhere. The corners, the floors. Then I saw it. There was a weird stick poking out of one of his trophies he had hung on the wall. I smiled. Dad was cleverer than I thought. I pulled the stick out with all my strength.
Location: Orc War Tent
“Morgan! We can’t keep this up! Soon we’ll lose our whole clan if we can’t push the human force out of the Woods! We have to go to war!” screamed an orc twice the size of those around him. The room was illuminated by candles around the tent. In the middle, there was a table and on it was a large map with pieces of stones. 8 orcs stood around the table each representing one of the following: Leader, Tactics, Training, Welfare, Armor, Weapons, Scout and War. All the orcs were stress. They had to make a decision of whether to aid the Hell Orcs or risk getting killed by them and the humans. The Hell orcs were the one who governed to Orcs. Their rule was easy, Follow or die. The Orcs were all confused. Whether they followed or not, they were going to die.
“I think its best we aid them in the war. It’s the best decision we got. We have more numbers and higher chance of survival. However, that means all of us have to go, including the children” said the leader of the orcs, Morgan, with a sad tone. He had lost many of his people trying to fight back the humans who were at the other side of the mountains. Now, he had to risk all of them. He looked at all of them ensuring that none had any refusal. All was silent and they just nodded. “Very well, this meeting is over. Spread the news among the clan.” he continued before walking out. If this was the choice that means his son had to follow him to. Then it hit him. His son. Oh god! His son doesn’t even want to kill a bird. How is he going to kill an army of humans! He was pondering over all this when he noticed that his room door was smashed down, in a nice way. He knew who it was already.
The stick finally came out, along with the trophy and pieces of the wall. I looked at it happily, thinking it was an axe when I noticed something. It was round and spiky; it was not sharp and thin. This isn’t an axe! This is… something! I was still thinking what this thing was when something called me out.
“Alemer? What are you doing with my mace?” my Dad asked me when he noticed me holding his mace. He then noticed the whole in the wall.” Did you make this hole in the wall?” he asked me curiously as he stepped closer. I knew this was going to turn ugly.
“Uhh…Yup! Ah ha… I was training, you know, ummm… following your footsteps...Aha.” I mumbled as I tried to hide the mace behind my back. The last thing I expected was my Dad smiling and laughing happily.
“This is good! Now I don’t need to worry about you! If you can do that kind of damage in war, you’ll be unstoppable! Son! You’re going to war with me! That’s every orcs dream!” he screamed happily as he started to wear his armor. At the first sound of war, my sight began to get blurry.
“Did I say I never liked blood, or violence, we’ll I’ll say it now. I don’t like any of those.” I explained to him as I tried to make him think right again. Me? War? They'll never go together.
“Who cares? Son! You’ve got potential! One day, you’re going to make you’re mark on the world! Oh ya! We’re leaving tonight, so if you need anything I’ll be at the Boar stable!” he said happily as he walked his way out of the room. I just stood there, shocked. I knew what I had to do. RUN.

This is my continuation to my prologue. Hope you enjoy it and Happy Holiday!

Hi Asteral! The name's Rach and I'm here to review!

First, I should say that I haven't read the prologue you referred to, but I think I followed along well enough.

Also, for future reference--and to garner up more readers--make sure to space out your paragraphs! The site kills whatever indentation you had, so

I'm a long-time LotR fan, so even if these aren't LotR orcs, I like your concept here. I like the fact that this is from an orc's point of view.

I am, however, having a bit of a hard time believing that your character is an orc, and that the other characters are orcs. One thing is that they sure speak differently than I'd expect! Which is interesting if you intended for them to sound so formal and such, but you'd have to do a lot of work to convince LotR fans like myself that these orcs are misunderstood creatures, not... well, vermin.

I usually don't like to intrude on anyone's story, but, if you wanted, you could just as easily make this about war-loving humans vs. other humans. History's stuff full of war-tribe cultures. Vikings, Saxons. (In fact, this scene here actually reminded me of a scene in How To Tame Your Dragon, the DreamWorks animated movie that came out maybe a year ago. 'Tis one of my favorites.)

But, again: the orc angle has a lot of potential. Overall, I think you have two directions with it. You could either keep going as is, with a sort of orcs-are-misunderstood bend (because here they don't seem half bad at all!), or you could... scrunge up their culture a bit, have 'em talk a little meaner, a little cruder, make their mannerisms less polite.

If you ask me, that last option might be my favorite of all, because, think about it: that has the potential to make readers feel sympathy for creatures they previously had nothing but contempt for, whereas the other option just leads to a milder action, more of a "What if orcs weren't the bad guys after all?"

Anyway, I totally just stuck my fingers in your story, and I apologize immensely. (I blame all the holiday cookies. That much chocolate must mess with my better judgement. )

For now, some other things I noticed of a less opinionated nature:

--You need big space breaks in between the first person sections and the third person section to help your reader keep track of what's going on!

--In prose, you're always going to want to type out numbers like 8 as eight, 198 as one hundred ninety-eight, etc. unless the number is in a year or a date. Just a good rule of thumb.

--When you're using Dad like a name, it's capitalized. When you have 'my' in front of it, it isn't. (Gotta love English capitalization rules!)

--Some of your dialogue formatting is a bit helter-skelter. Here's a good thread about it: topic41705.html

And... I think that's it for now! Don't forget to space out those paragraphs next time, and let me know if you have any questions about anything! I'm here to help--just shoot me a PM or post something on my Wall

Rach