Some Orc’s Diary (Humor)

[Gopblin]

This is an old joke that has been going around Russian FIDOnet for years back in the 90s. I translated a piece, feel free to repost. I may post more later.

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Some Orc’s Diary

2nd of 2nd month
PT my *ss. Today was endurance training – our company was running up and down the main Angband staircase, dodging the passing Balrogs. After five trips none of us could stand, so they simply pushed us to the bottom – to the biolabs – and opened some door. Door the size of a decent hill. When Glauring’s curious snout appeared out of there, we beat all previous speed records, Glau only got fat Umfarg and a few stragglers. Others made it to the narrow galleries – the dragon can’t fit in there, so he only jokingly spit some flames, but that’s nothing. Three guys got burned alve.
In the evening we had Political Information. Urthang was teaching. Explained to us that elves are murderous bastards with no manners or morality, but at the same time weaklings that can’t do anything except shoot at our guys from the bushes. He also explained that the Silmarils are rightfully ours, they weren’t made by Feanor but by Priperdum, orc weaponmaker, who’s still standing in the museum (stuffed).
Soon we’ll go raiding.


16th of 2nd month.
Was guarding our birthplace – the Big Boss’s famous 5th Lab. Everything is so familiar here – test tubes, flasks, magic amplifiers. On the wall – elf dissection (poster), orc dissection (poor bastard), and several creepy transitional stages. Rows of vats stretching into the darkness. Everything reminds me of childhood. Brings tears to my eyes. That’s because of the air – no place has air like this. Sauron once walked in without a gas mask – passed out in less than a minute despite being a Maiar. You have to breathe this from childhood.


44th of 2nd month
Went raiding. Afterwards we caught Urthang and kicked the snot out of him. “Elves are weaklings, elves are only good at killing each other over Silmarils”. I don’t know, they seem to do a great job with our guys too.
Basically, we went into the forest in three colums. Within squealing distance, so we could reinforce each other. Brave Talhur was leading us, so he got nailed to a tree first. Arrows were flying from all sides – I got lucky, mine penetrated the breastplate but went at an angle, just a flesh wound. Being an experienced fighter, I knew what to do - fell on the corpses, soiled my pants and played dead.
The two companies that were supposed to be our backup didn’t do much, of course. The closest unit tried to move in, but the leading guys fell into a bearpit and the rest restreated heroically. The third column was all damn newbies fresh from their mommies. There are hardly any 5th lab veterans remaining.
Moms are making orcs now, the blood is growing thin. Makes me sick to look at em.

22nd of 3rd month
Crawling around the marshes for the last five weeks. Looking for Gondolin. Can’t seem to find it, and no wonder – why would the Elves live in a swamp? They like forests, and dry ones. But – we’re looking here. Keeping busy, staying alive. I have developed deep respect for Leutenant Inghak.


25th
Pirpuk went bonkers. Runs around the forest, looks under small stones, lifts rotten tree trunks – looking for the hidden city. From time to time, lets out a piercing scream of “Gondolin! Come out, I see you!!”. We tried to put him out of his misery and into a cooking pot, but he’s big, struggled free and ran away.

29th
Leutenant Inghak was reassigned, we got Urthang. This one thinks he’s very smart, got us out of the swamps and herded towards the mountains. My gut is telling me this won’t end well – we may actually find Gondolin.

30th
When we got to the very menacing mountains, lieutenant immediately pushed us to crawl along the narrow cliffside paths. Poor Pil’hak fell off the edge – flat as a pancake. This got Urhang overexcited, he started shouting that this is foul Elvish sorcery and our target is near. Then when half the platoon was crawling up a sheer cliff face, that retard Pirpuk appeared with his shrill “GOOONDOLIIIIN!!!” Guys dropped like flies, we were cleaning up the bodies till nightfal.

32nd
Found something. Probably not Gondolin, but more than enough. Only three of us survived, mostly by accident. Tilguk, Big Boss bless him, managed to charge through to the waterfall and jumped in, dragging me too. We found Urthang on the shore and allowed him to tag along in case we start starving on the way back.
…

48th of 4th month
Sauron managed to convince the Big Boss to do another project, so he got a special lab and a hundred newbies. He got me too but thankfully as a secretary and not as a subject. I’ll be keeping track of everything, recording experiments, and reporting to the Big Boss if things go as usual (and Sauron’s genius projects usually end with a bang and a huge chewing-out).
So, Sauron decided to teach orcs to fly. This was inspired by recent events when some crazy Elf chick flew into the throne room on a kite out of bat wings and nicked a Silmaril, so Big Boss wants to develop our own airborne troops. Now Sauron herds a dozen new pilots to the Wind Peak every morning, fixes various wings to their backs and kicks em off. Pushing them off the Wind Peak was my idea – I was tired of dragging the corpses out of the lab, and the Wind Peak is directly over the warg pits, so feeding the wargs is also a lot simpler now. Frankly, if being in the lab didn’t beat being at the frontlines, I’d advise Sauron to just do them in all at once – they’re factory defects anyway, experimental batch. They were supposed to come out even fiercer, but someone messed up the incubation times, so they came out all bald and stuttering, as well as all limping on left legs for some reason. Big Boss forbid walking in formation for them – we’re more or less okay watching it, but Balrogs overheat from laughter and melt through the floors.




Best wishes,
Daniel

[Gopblin]

12th of 3rd month
Sauron found out I can write and got me transferred to Research. That department was just founded by the Big Boss to investgate the causes of our losses at the Doriath front. We quickly determined that the main problem seems to be elven archers easily shooting our boys from cover. They’re very accurate, so regardless of how much metal our guys put on the elven arrows find a gap.
Sau’s first invention was gapless armor. An orc in high metal boots is covered by something like a giant metal bucket. The bucket has a spear fixed to it. The end result looks something like a walking metal teapot with a very long handle. These teapots actually looked quite menacing in formation – until they started walking, because they couldn’t keep the same pacing, immediately starting to bump into each other and making a hellish racket. Rough terrain trials led to an even more pathetic result – the poor tin cans couldn’t stay together, as Sau made them totally safe by not having any viewing slits. In less than five minutes the area was a mess of crazy teapots going off in random directions, running into each other, and sounding like a cartful of frying pans tumbling downhill.
Big Boss looked sour, but Sau kept his act together and immediately suggested an improvement: Two dozen buckets are firmly fixed so as to form a line, so they would not be able to wander off individually. Big Boss approved, the blacksmiths got to work, and in two hours the first heavy phalanx in Middle-Earth was ready for trials.
Fourth platoon got into their teapots and the steel wall started to advance of the opposing force. Sau got overexcited, ran up to the Big Boss, and went off on a spiel for a sudden massive use of his groundbreaking invention, waving his arms and sometimes jumping up a bit – but then a sudden frown on Melkor’s face made him turn arond.
The phalanx came up on a small gully. Te right flank lost their footing and fell out to the bottom. That edge of the superpot was no longer supported, the guys in the middle were suddenly jerked and someone lost their balance – and the steel wall tumbled. The guys on the left flank were thrown out of their buckets, while most of the center ones had jerking legs sticking out above them.
Big Boss gave Sauron good long look and went to HQ. Sauron dragged after him, mumbling that if we fix steel spikes to the boots, tumbling may actually work to our advantage.

……

22nd of 7th month
Sauron is into paranormal abilities now. He already has his first result – he found out that Glaurung can mesmerize his victims and plans to bring his full hypnotic might to bear against the elves. He can’t quite how figure out how to do that yet, so for now he just has Glau training in Angband according to the manual Sau wrote. Unfortunately, Glau reads even worse than Sauron writes, so his interpretation of hypnosis was hitting the victims upside the head with paws or tail. By now he’s all grown up, so in two weeks of mesmerizing he managed to get roughly three dozen of our guys, give Gothmog a black eye and disincorporate Sau. He seems to target wargs mostly, though – mesmerized like fifty of them, must have something to do with recent events. Of course, mesmerizing works best on walking targets in the open, so pretty soon everyone was moving around Angband in a curious combination of creeping and dashing between pieces of cover. Big Boss finally noticed his army is rapidy diminishing, got somewhat pissed off, and sent Glaurung to practice hypnosis somewhere outside. He ordered him to find and destroy Gondolin (the one we razed two months ago turned out to be another fake). We had about four happy weeks without the damn lizard, but then he showed up at the main gate. He looked pretty miserable – thin, with ribs showing, dragging his tail, missing half his teeth, and giving everyone the sad puppy look. He didn’t want to talk about where he’s been – only after a direct order from the Big Boss he scrawled something like a report. After reading his chicken cratch, Sauron was quite puzzled – the dragon’s report was so convoluted and contradictory that showing it to the Boss was quite risky. He called me and we dig through the journey description for three days, trying to reformat it into something coherent.
So, Glaurung slithered out of the main gate and headed south. He went south for a long time – went over two mountain ranges and forded a bunch of rivers. On the way he saw elves but couldn’t get close enough to them to mesmerize. He sustained himself by hypnotizing and eating various small animals. Then he turned south (I have to mention that the dragon only knows one direction, so this was probably means west) and in a week he made it to the sea. On the way he stumbled on a village where he managed to hypnotize several humans. Unfortunately they could not be interrogated, so he ate them.
After breaking camp near the sea (here me and Sauron argued. He thought the worm attacked the enemy camp and the was a big fight that he won, or his hide would be on Gondolin’s gates. I thought the dragon just means he slept on the warm sand while digesting humans).
Then Glaurung went south (here we decided to believe him) and at night attacked an enemy detachment, probably successfully (this is true beyond a doubt – that was our second scouting company, some stragglers made it back a week ago. The only thing that’s unclear is what happened to Aso, the Balrog attached to the unit? Did this dinosaur finally figure out how to digest them?)
Then Glaurung caught some prisoner that told him that Gondolin is five day’s march to the south, between two easily recognisible towering mountains, on the shore of a mountain lake. After snacking, the dragon went in that direction (here neither me nor Sauron could figure out which way he went) and in five days ended up in the desert. After no finding any mountains or lakes and getting hungry, Glau went south (most likely north).
On the way he probably chanced upon some elves (although the report says he just stumbled into a tree several times), who poked a bunch of holes in his hide and gave him a black eye. After this he lost his capacity for hypnosis – judging by his blisters, he was running from the elves almost all the way to Angband.
Glaurung was very adamant that he always walked in straight lines, but that is highly questionable – someone cut his right front paw and when he arrived to Angband he was walking in limping semicircles. By the way, initially Glau thought he finally found Goldolin – kicked down the gate and gave Gothmog a nasty jaw fracture.


Best wishes,
Daniel

[Mhaedros]

These are really good

[Gopblin]

45th of 10th month
Learning by experience, Big Boss forbid Sauron interfering with combat operations and planning, which led to a marked increase in our force’s effectiveness in the last few months. As Sau was banned from science as well, at least for now, the only outlets for his boiling energies were culture and art.
He started thinking that after our immunent victory we’ll need various specialists such as historians, writers, and poets to sing praise to the heroic accomplishments of the Boss and his trusted lieutenants, as well as inspire the population to further heroic feats. To prepare the first generation of praise singers and inspirational writers he got a dozen guys that could write from the frontline and appointed me secretary again. After reading several lectures on basic composing words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters and so on to short stories and novels , as well as different writing and poetic styles, Sauron decided the students are ready for working independently and ordered them to bring their creations to him in a week. Otherwise – back to the front.
Nobody wanted to go back to the Doriath meatgrinder, so in a week Sauron had a stack of thick manuscripts on his table. Subsequent analysis showed that the most popular genre was war memoirs and diaries. That would have been fine had our Tolstoi talked less about realism and more about making inspirational hyperbolas. As is was, all these “Memories of a Raider” and “The Gondolin Front” things painted an unsettling picture of blatant incompetence rampant at all levels of the chain of command, constant chaos in frontline supply and communication, as well as grim reports of which unit, when, where and how was slaughtered and who’s fault it was.
The only exception was Irhak, who decided to become famous in science fiction. He pushed out “Elfstompa” – a novel about several extremely talented young orcs under the guidance of a wise Maiar named Nosaur creating a machine that squished elves. This contraption cleared Middle-Earth from elves in under half a year, but then became dangerous to it’s creators as there was no way to switch it off. Then one of the inventors named Hakir disguised himself as an elf. Elfstompa took the bait and started chasing him. Here the novel went off a philosophical tangent, talking about an eternal journey. The novel had a happy ending however – Hakir’s friends invented a way to send Elfstompa to Halls of Mandos, where it’ll be busy for a good long while.


Best wishes,
Daniel

[Macilrille]

Too bad Daniel went silent. This has a very Russian flavour to it that I like.