Religious Fangs, a novel
By Roberto Luengo
Copyright 2013 Roberto Luengo
Disclaimer
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
Prologue
Guillem and all his family were profoundly catholic, going to church frequently, participating in all their events, sometimes giving religion classes in the private school his family owned and basically doing anything that was required to make the world a bit of a better place.
He had known his best friends for all his life, all of them lived in the same block, all of them studied in the same high school and now most of them stayed together through college. For him it was not hard finding friends, but it was tough to keep them, most people found hard to understand his devotion to God. That is why he loved so much the few friends he had, each one was so different, but still all of them loved him back unconditionally, it was always hard to find someone that would respect his catholic faith.
Their friendship grew the most in college, because that is when they started having the same hobby of collecting and playing collectible cards.
The first to grow as a close friend was Tom. He was a quiet and friendly guy, a bit on the fat side, with short and curly hair and a dark skin tone. He was always around and would talk with anyone he found interesting without any problem. He used to practise a lot of karate when he was younger and would never allow anyone to disrespect him or his friends, he was always the first to go and defend them. Tom was the only one in the group studying biology but worked as a program developer and hardware service.
Through Tom he learned to love both Xavier and Roberto. They had made a very small and weird little society by pooling resources to buy and collect cards, it was weird because of how different the three of them were emotionally and physically. Xavier was way older than both of them, in fact, he is the oldest of the whole group but still managed to look way younger than the others. He was very pale and thin with blond soft hair. He had that feeling of security to his personality that comes with age, but it was strangely mixed with a lot of stubbornness and he always behaved in an extremely agile and energetic way. Roberto on the other hand was very pale as well, but he was as fat as Tom and slightly taller. He was always very direct and honest in his approach to everything he did, never quitted anything until he saw it to the end and always behaved very stubbornly. He was the laziest and most out of shape of them all, but still had a lot of natural strength. Both of them would always leave behind anything they were doing or thinking in order to help their friends and both studied computer science.
Cristobal was a behemoth of a man. They got closer to him through playing cards as well, but he did not study in the same college. Being in a different college never stop him from being there playing and sharing with them all the time he could spare. People usually misunderstood his character because he always seemed to be slow, but that was not the case, he just enjoyed playing dumb. What he did have was the heart of a lion when it came to helping his friends. Slowly he managed to make their friendship stronger even though he always drove Guillem mad with his childish comments.
Last but not least were Edward, Lucio and Maria. The three of them came to his best friends group the last. Edward was a very close friend to Cristobal because they had always being next door neighbours. Very easy to overlook anywhere he went since he had a very unassuming look and enjoyed using suits and other formal clothes. He had dark hair and fair skin colour as well. Very evenly tempered and mildly fit, his was their first option when they needed financial advise to do the taxes. He started working very early in his life and had many contacts everywhere. Lucio was very close to Cristobal as well being his other next door neighbour. Dark skinned and of very short stature, he enjoyed reading anything he could find around and then talking and teaching them all he could to the point of annoying Cristobal all the time, sometimes he made everyone wonder if he was not getting a bit crazier every day with all the weird stuff he spoke about. Finally Maria, another computer science student, she was a tiny girl with dark coloured skin and with the body of a model and big beautifully shaped breasts as well. She enjoyed dressing in a very feminine way that would highlight all her great attributes. Because of the many abusive men and women she met over her life, she had learned to defend herself quite well, having a very quick and acid mind and being extremely fast and nimble. Her interests were drastically different from those of everyone else in the group, she loved dancing and exercising but loved spending time with the group nonetheless, they made her feel understood and in return she gave them her friendship and convinced them sometimes of going out and doing something different.
Every day his friends would pick him up using both Cristobal and Roberto's cars to go to college, from there some would go study while others would go directly to play or work. But during the day they would always find a way to get together to play and share. The play group included many other people that loved the game as much as they did, but as it happens with most of these games, most of them were very weird in their own way.
There was a very fat guy named Francisco with very weathered skin and rotten teeth always playing cards, he would always try and hit on every women he saw, but would always get refused and then go back into the game. He started to slowly fantasise that he had crazy powers and did all sorts of weird stuff, it was a lot of fun listening to him how he beat groups of people or seduced many women in his life. As of lately he had somehow gained a small group of young people that followed him everywhere, they probably believed his stories. He even manage to convince one of his female followers to become his girlfriend, she looked like a child and was probably his first girl friend ever.
There was as well a group of guys that always loved hitting on women, they were not bad looking, but their behaviour was always disgusting making most serious women around them uncomfortable. Having said that they managed to weed out all the crazier girls in the science faculty and always had a few of those girls close to them. They kept asking those girls to try to convince Maria to have a date with them, even going so far as to tell her she should have a relationship with them because they were great fun, but she always saw past their lies and kept refusing to date them or even be seen too close to them.
There were always a lot of other people, mainly teenagers that became excited with the game and would go all the time to play and believe they were something else, like a wizard or the master of some crazy creatures. There were as well some guys that had lost their girlfriends and lives to the game, looking more like soulless bodies.
It was always a weird and sometimes pathetic spectacle, but something they all enjoyed sharing anyway.
His life plans only went as far as finishing his history degree in college and then dedicating himself to helping his family and friends to improve themselves spiritually and maybe get more involved in church if that was possible. A lot of people always spoke about leaving Great Colombia, but that was never an option to him. This was his country, where his family and friends lived, so he would never be able to go and leave them behind.
Why did people want to leave the country? Well, that is one of the things that happen when you have many decades of corruption as happens in every third world country, but Grea
t Colombia was more stable than most, the country started as an experiment made by Simon Bolivar back in 1819 by merging a few of the countries of old, the country was divided in three territories or departments which were Venezuela, Cundinamarca and Quito. There have always been a power struggle between all the territories, but the recent presidents managed to achieve a tense state of peace, the capital of the country was Caracas in the Venezuelan territory. The other territories had their capital cities, but every city other than Caracas felt very underdeveloped, to the point that most people travelled to Caracas to work and live there even if that meant living in inhuman conditions. The Cundinamarcan territory had a lot of internal struggle because of a big drug problem and some revel armies that kept the territory in a constant war state. Although underdeveloped, the Quito territory was relatively peaceful. Despite all these problems the country really felt as if it was going to grow into a developed country some day, there were many natural resources, great education at least in the capital and wonderful happy people or so