Dystopia - Chapter 1

[cirquesation]

(edit: the last few sentences got screwed up; it should be fixed now)
First chapter hype!

Just a short chapter to get you introduced to the characters and situations.

(it also ends very abruptly)

KA-CHINK.

The infected goes down with a single swing of a metal bat to its rotting skull.  Today’s scavenging mission was uneventful and came up with only a few rations from an abandoned campsite nearby.

“Damn guy came out of nowhere,”  Guude curses, gripping his shotgun with sweaty palms.  “Thanks Nebris.”

“The sun is setting.”  Avidya motions.

The world has gone to hell in the past ten years or so (there’s no way to tell what year it is let alone what day it is; the seasons ungratefully remind you of the harshness of whatever time of year it is, though): nuclear bombs were dropped and contaminated the Earth making it hurt to try and breathe plus there’s a certain parasite that rots its host from the inside out and turns them into a lifeless, walking shell of a monster that wants to kill you.  Trying to survive is futile but for whatever reason humanity’s pride won’t let them give up.

As they walk Guude starts to rummage in his bag: “Not much here,” He says in a husky and tired voice. “Jeff’ll like these, though.”  He adjusts the stack of small gauze pads so that they’re easily accessible in his satchel.

“God knows we need them.”  Nebris states.

Because of the condition of the world having an alias is not uncommon-most people do-nobody seriously questions or cares who you are or what you did before the fallout so long as they know if you’re friend or foe; some people are more open about their real names and previous endeavors while some keep everything hidden.  There’s constantly a cautiousness in whatever you say or do, however, one wrong move could cost your life in this game of death so it’s better not to pry and make enemies.

One tedious hike back and they find themselves at the road’s treeline.

“Crackers!”  Avidya shouts as they approach the base camp, giving the secret signal that they’re friendly.

Pakratt rushes from his post on the roof to the barricaded door: “Welcome back.”  He says through the glass as he moves the barricade and unlatches the security bars.

Five particular survivors have made themselves at home in a small, abandoned drugstore for the past five months or so.  The surrounding area has been explored to its fullest extent, however, so a new decision needs to be made.

“We heard the gunshots a little earlier, is everything OK?”  Guude asks when he finally steps inside.

“Yeah, just a few in the back we thought were too close.”  Pakratt explains.

“We figured that was it since you were only using a pistol.”

The four continue into the back room, Nebris closes and secures the door behind them.

JSano looks up from the small fire: “Welcome back.”

“Glad to see we aren’t dead?”  Avidya jokes.

Guude grabs the gauze pads and throws them to JSano before he joins the other two to empty his bag into the community pile.

“I’ll take watch now.”  Nebris tells Pakratt.  Pakratt nods in agreement and Nebris leaves to climb the ladder to the roof.

“We were worried you wouldn’t be back in time.”  JSano says as Guude slumps down next to him.

“We can’t keep doing this,”  Guude says exasperatedly.  “We’ve almost reached how far away we can search in a day and I’d rather not have the search parties out at night.”

“We could always move home base somewhere else.”  Pakratt suggests.

“But we’re so well protected here that we would be gambling our safety if we left,”  Avidya reasons.  “There’s no telling if we would even find somewhere.”

The group becomes silent.

“Worrying about things like that will only cause wrinkles,”  JSano says as he rations out the two cans of beans that had been previously cooking over the fire.  “Avidya, could you take this to Nebris?”  Avidya nods and exits the room.

“Maybe,”  Guude takes his portion from JSano.  “But if we don’t worry about it it will never be resolved, you know?”

The small and unsatisfying meal was uneventful and filled with tense silence.  Avidya and Guude decide to rummage through the pile and see what exactly was found.

Guude walks to their small icebox.  “We didn’t find much food.”  He says as he fills the icebox with the scanty food supply.

“We did find you some ammo, though.”  Avidya holds up the shotgun shells.

A bit more rummaging and the pile is now almost gone.

“Son of a-”  Nebris’ yells from the maintenance room.

JSano is the first to rush in and immediately begins checking Nebris for injury.  “How did you hurt your hand?”

“I slipped trying to climb down and the bastard ladder cut me!”  Nebris yells, gripping his hand tightly to numb the sting.

“Why did you have the lantern?  You know it’s dangerous to carry that thing and have to come down with only one hand!”  Pakratt exclaims, gesturing to the broken lantern on the ground.

Nebris doesn’t answer and instead continues gripping his profusely bleeding hand.  “Be glad I’m here.”  JSano says as he guides Nebris into the back room.

He sits Nebris down on a folding chair and quickly gets the supplies he needs.  Nebris releases his hand and JSano starts to rinse the wound with bottled water; he has Nebris apply pressure and eventually dresses the wounds with gauze and gauze pads.  The group watches in awe at how fast he works although they’ve seen it before.

“Lucky it was your left hand,”  JSano says.  “You should still be able to swing your bat with your right but don’t use your left until it’s fully healed.”

“That’s a euphemism if I ever heard one.”  Avidya jokes, attempting to lighten the mood.

Chuckles fill the room.

“Since you spoke up you can take first watch.”  Guude throws Avidya his crossbow.

“I guess that’s what I get.”  Avidya responds, grabbing a nearby jacket and climbing the ladder.

Comments

[yamina_chan]

I had been meaning to read this and now, while I wait on something to finish, I decided to take the time and give a look. =)

- And feedback.
First of all, my overall impression.

The dark and grim setting is not an unusuall one, but one that can make for interesting stories if one takes it the right ways. There's barely any information on the area, just enough to get a vague mental image. That can be both good or bad and only future chapters will tell which one it is. The slection of characters is interesting and promising if you utilize their personalities, as you've got quite the interesting mix there.


Now, on to the more specific things. Things that I believe you can improve on, to better your writing and to better the reading experience for those who look at your work =)

First of all: your summary. You know...the one that's not there? Mindcracklove is not a site designed for storytelling specifically, and there's also no easy way to categorize by author, where one might read your work based on your other work. A summary, a teaser is ALWAYS needed when posting a story to make your reader curious and in a setup like this one even more.
First chapter hype!
Just a short chapter to get you introduced to the characters and situations.
(it also ends very abruptly)
This...does nothing to make a reader curious. You can't rely on character tags alone (although that's how I got here). Looking at this as a reader who knows nothing about this (remember: you are telling the story to us; you may know what it's about but we don't) here's how the thought process will go: "First chapter hype? Okay, of what? Is this a new chapter in a Series? Doesn't say so... So it's very short...good to know, I guess? What's short in this case? 100 words? 500? 1000? 2000? Short is relative. And it ends abruptly...okay, I had to know that now why...? What's it about, where is it set? Doesn't sound like something that you wanna get invested in, time to move on..."
- or something like that. Yes, I know summaries can be hard because you don't want to spoil things, but you need to make the potential readers curious about your work.

Next up the actual start. The soundeffect that you picked seems...off. Kachink is something that you use when hollow metal hits hollow metal, for example, not when metal hits flesh. Especially rotting flesh.

Then, based on that line, undead are fought. Exciting!...Except the very next sentence claims things are uneventfull. So Fighting is just something one does casually without paying it much mind, like window shopping or washing the dishes? The spark of tension and interest at the potentially dangerous situation is instantly killed off by this. As such both Guudes comment and Avidyas hint at the time appear to be nothing more then a minor inconvinence that you don't realy have to pay much attention to. Not even three paragraphs into the stoy all sense of danger has been lost. For a story with the name Distopia, that's probably not a good thing.

nuclear bombs were dropped and contaminated the Earth making it hurt to try and breathe - erm... No. That's not how that works. In fact, that's one of the few symptoms that you won't get from radiation; even minor radiation.
If you want to deal with something this big, then I suggest you do more research and try to learn as much as possible about how radiation affects humans and other living beings; animals and plants alike.
- It's also a bit rushed in terms of backstory. Dropped by who? Against who? Where? And how many? And why?

plus there’s a certain parasite that rots its host from the inside out and turns them into a lifeless, walking shell of a monster that wants to kill you. That too is just thrown in there in a bit of a rush and doesn't really tell you anything.

The next thing that has me raise my eyebrows is how Avidya is the one leaving the room to bring the food to Nebris, yet he's looking through the bags with Guude at the same time? How's that supposed to work?

And...that euphemism is really quite the stretch, even for grasping at straws.

And then...well, as you said, the chapter ends abruptly. Which I expected to mean "cliffhanger", but no. It really just stops in the middle and for the life of me I can see no reason why you would do this.


So, all in all... As it stands, there's the possibility of a promising multichapter story here, but there's also nothing yet that would make you want to come back and read more.

[cirquesation]

Thank you for your feedback, I'm not a professional writer by any means and I'm going into this style of writing with no prior experience (that was my first mistake). I wrote the prologue and first four chapters in a bunch when I was sick at home with nothing to do so they are extremely incomplete and lack any action.
Since then I've done much more research and have been spending much more time proofreading and questioning them before I call them "complete".

As I stated above, I wrote a prologue called "Chapter 0" explaining the backstory of the apocalypse but it is also very incomplete and has many mistakes since I wrote it when I wrote the first four chapters.

I always assumed that if you lived in any type apocalypse for a long amount of time dealing with the things that came with it (like zombies and radiation) on a daily basis would become common; I feel like the only things survivors would find "exciting" or "dangerous" are the things they don't see every day (like other survivors). There's always an imminent threat of death by zombies and radiation but it's become so imminent that, although they still fear it, they don't fear it near as much as when it was fresh, new, and unknown. I don't write first-person in this story but I still try to keep the intimacy of knowing only what the protagonists know and writing like you're experiencing the situations with them. That's why I don't include every detail, to keep the reader entertained and guessing "who" "what" "when" "where" and "why" just like the characters are.

Overall there's a lot that I could work on and that I plan to work on so I hope that you keep reading and letting me know where I could improve so that all my readers, not just you, can experience Dystopia to its full.

[yamina_chan]

To the best of my knowledge, none of us here are 'professional' writers, but we can still try to help each other to improve our craft. =)

The setting and story of this is interesting; it's how it's presented that falters. Which can be improved on, and if you wrote them while you were ill then it's not to surprising that things slipped bast the radar.

And I agree with you that these threads become less "scary" as time goes on. It's the fact that it specifically refered to the combat that made me point this out, as that is something you don't want to become a casual thing in a life or death scenario. No matter how good you are, no matter how many times you have done this, if you don't stay alert, the price may be to much to pay. Of course they are not going to panic in the same manner that they would when this was new, that would be silly, but comebat should never be 'uneventfull'. 'Peacefull compared to other days' or 'handled with pracrticed routine' or 'mostly uneventfull with only one encounter' or something like that would serve the situaton better.
Downplaying the danger due to the zombies is not the same as making the encounter less dangerous based on more experience.

That said...I saw and see no mention of the prolouge you refear to in this chapter anywhere. If I had, then this would have been what I would have looked at first. With a site such as DW it's usually beneficial to add a link to the first, the prior and the next chapter (if there are those things) or to a master-list before the cut. =)

I do plan on coming back to this and read more when my time allows this, as I'm still interested in the setting. Finding the time to do so is the difficult part.