TJ felt it was strange to leave behind Copper tiered Skills in favor of one that had been offered to him at the very first opportunity. Sure, he hadn't taken it at that time, but now he had and though he welcomed the change, especially when seeing his Strength as a coatl soaring to 80. Even so, he'd been assured by the System that Skills could continue to progress, and the idea that the Skill could offer greater changes to his attributes and ability to deal death was heartening.
As the effects of the Skill settled over him, the party of haggard hunters stepped into the bounds of Pine. It may have all been in their heads, but TJ could feel the moment they arrived in the safe zone. It wasn't too far from his and Stanton's claimed home at this point, and TJ realized that he'd have to move before too long, given the shrinking radius of safety that surrounded the general store. He'd always hated moving, but given that none of the things that filled the home, except for the unprocessed javelina hides and wendigo bits, were his, it wouldn't be too troublesome.
As he turned to stagger into his home, TJ groaned. The sun was beginning to set, and there was so much left to do. So much that even assigning the two Free Points he had settled over his soul with an annoying weight, but TJ refused to slow down. He was emotionally and physically exhausted, and that couldn't matter.
"Do you want me to leave the materials to you? Or someone else? Or should I just get started tanning the hides and seeing what else we can do with these things?"
"Take em." Zig answered, still curt. TJ didn't push, merely nodding and asking that they leave the bodies near enough to the house as to not inconvenience him. Sarah grunted and let the mountain lion corpse drop where she stood and took two steps away. Before anyone reacted to that, though, she turned around, picked it back up, carried it respectfully to the door, where she dropped it, muttered an apology to TJ, and walked off. It was so unexpected and just outright silly in the situation they found themselves in that the frosty air that had settled over the rest of the hunting party melted and most chuckled aloud.
"I don't know what to say about that," Zig said as she allowed a grin to crook at the corner of her mouth, "but I think that's enough of being pissy. TJ, I don't think I can trust my back to you right now. Feelings are still too raw, frankly. Even so, I get you weren't really in control of yourself, and it isn't fair of us to be pissed at you when, while we didn't threaten you directly, you still stuck with us when we were in the middle of that Fear. I'll need time away from you to feel totally safe, but I still know you're on our side, and you don't deserve to be treated like shit. I'm sorry."
"I… I appreciate it." TJ changed from apologizing as well, instead accepting the apology. "I understand why you might not want to be around me. Still have days of this left, though, and I hope we can still work together."
"Sure. Have a good evening, snakey boy." Then, Zig turned to walk to the firehouse after dropping the javelina corpse nearby.
"It'll be fine soon. I bet Sarah's just embarrassed." Farid said, though he looked nowhere near as confident as his words made him seem. "She's… I don't know what I'm saying. But she's a friend and good people. Don't worry about it."
"I might worry about it," TJ answered, "but I don't think I'll wake up with a hatchet buried in my skull. Thanks, Farid. Have a good night."
"Sure. If you need someone to come with you on a hunt, let me know! Just… I don't think we should go back to that forest any time soon, how about you?"
"No. Not if I can help it." TJ answered with a shudder.
Rebekkah left without another word, though she groaned in relief as she dropped the corpse to the ground near the house. She nodded and walked towards the firehouse as well, making TJ wonder if he wanted to go there now and allow himself to relax. The thought of being left with nothing to do with his hands as the memories of Mari's face twisted by that monster's intent… he didn't want to deal with that. Then again, there was Angelo he'd wanted to speak to…
"Rebekkah?" TJ called out as the woman continued walking. She turned. "Could you ask Angelo to come visit me? I have a couple of questions I wonder if he can answer."
"Of course. You can come as well."
"Not this time." TJ felt his smile grow bitter and brittle.
Rebekkah merely nodded and continued on her way. TJ sighed and turned to the pile of five corpses. The four javelinas, now that they were out of the oppressive darkness of the Chindi's Forest, were vaguely silver, even without their charging Skill. Looking down at the corpses, TJ Appraised them again.
Ironhide Javelina corpse. A mostly whole corpse of a javelina whose evolutionary path has been decided to be towards becoming more and more impenetrable and powerful in their charges.
TJ hadn't paid much attention to the death notifications of the javelinas when they'd died, but after asking the System to bring the notifications back, he saw that they were indeed called "Ironhide Javelinas". That probably meant the hides would be worth significantly more than those of the regular javelinas they'd killed before, and TJ decided to skin the corpses immediately.
With the Wendigo Blade and occasional bursts of wind that he sent through the tip of the Blade, TJ was quickly able to skin one of the javelinas. It was a less bloody affair now that he drew on attributes so much higher than before, and that paired with the much superior tool compared to his stones from before allowed TJ to be mostly through the second corpse's processing by the time Angelo turned the corner.
"Oh. Hi. You looking for help or something? I'm a Medic, not a Tanner or whatever." Angelo said, though he seemed entirely unphased by the bloody scene.
"Well, yes." TJ grunted as he pulled the skin back off the flesh and tore it from the connective tissue. "But not with this. I encountered something else from your people, and wondered if you'd be able to tell me about it."
Angelo's easygoing stance shifted to become more guarded. "Just because a lot of the stuff here is Indian doesn't mean it's Navajo."
"I know, the System already said that it's Navajo. Called a Chindi. Something you can talk about?"
"Well, yeah. But you shouldn't really talk about the recently dead." Angelo hedged. "What do you want to know?"
"Ran into what I thought was my dead wife's spirit." TJ deliberately kept himself focused on the task at hand, trying not to focus on the reality of what he was saying. "It was… like all the angry, mean parts of her without all the good. It Charmed me, gave me an affliction that basically made me listen to what it said. Long story short, when I Appraised the thing, the System said it was a Chindi. I asked it what that was, and it just told me it's basically an evil spirit. Is this thing… the ghost of my wife?"
"So, that's not exactly what Chindi is. Did your wife die in the Integration?"
"No, it's been over a year." TJ shook his head and Angelo shrugged.
"It's probably not her, then, unless she died near here. That said, the System is twisting and changing a lot of our beliefs, so it might just be presenting whatever it's making as if it were a Chindi. Or…" he trailed off, worrying at his lower lip for a moment as he thought. TJ didn't interrupt as he shucked the last of the second javelina's pelt from the body.
"It could be that it is a Chindi, and from someone who died in the forest. Then, strengthened by the System to become a monster, its power now allows it to better influence people who come near it. A Chindi is the representation of all that is evil, malicious, and angry left by a person, and this sounds like it could be that. I don't know anything else about this monster in particular, but did you pick something up in the forest that could have belonged to someone? Because Chindi is much less of a creature than a… presence or a miasma. If you have an item from the dead, the Chindi will follow that, as the miasma is linked with that person's items."
"I don't think we had anything like that." TJ shrugged. "We killed some of the monsters there and so on, but no clothes or bones or whatever."
"Well, then I think it might well be the spirits of those who died in that forest, empowered by the System and come to be something worse than what they're named." Angelo shrugged, as though he couldn't be bothered to care much more about it. "And I don't think that it's your wife. Maybe you said something that gave it that idea, and then it capitalized on it."
TJ sighed. "I guess that's good news. Ok. Thanks."
"Sure thing. Thanks for remembering my tribe. Before I go, you need any healing?"
"I leveled up just before this." TJ shook his head. "I'm good, thanks."
Angelo nodded and went his way towards the hunter's lodge, where he jogged in. On a whim, TJ continued to watch as the door opened, and inside the building he saw a surprising amount of bare flesh. TJ sighed and, without thinking about it, looked down at his hands. Across the road, the twenty-somethings were just losing themselves in sex and alcohol and whatever else that could take their minds off of the lives they now led. TJ, moping widower that he was, was elbow deep in viscera while he carved the skin from the flesh of javelinas.
Self pity aside, the bodies needed to be processed and there was work still to do. TJ could feel the experience coming through as he did this most menial yet integral part of the processing of the hides. He grumbled to himself as he realized he hadn't prepared any fire or anything to boil the brains to smear on the hides once they were prepared, and TJ remembered the little aside the System had provided for him on the other hides he'd prepared. "the process artificially accelerated by the creator's presence in a Tutorial". The longer he took to do this, the less experience would come his way.
Unwilling to lose more time, TJ set to tearing into the third of the javelinas. These were just going to serve as the warmup for the much more interesting mountain lion. Its description, Tezcatlipoca-Blessed mountain lion, drew TJ's imagination, and after learning that Tezcatlipoca was the Aztec god of the night sky, he figured he knew where their near invisibility and incorporeality came from. So, he focused on cleanly, effectively carving the hides from the javelina corpses. The third was complete before long, and the fourth followed soon thereafter. Though he could feel that the next level was nowhere near, TJ still decided to take care of the cleaning of the hides and lathering on the brain mixture before touching the mountain lion.
"Mr. TJ! Hey! Where are you? You said we could come back later and get some more training, so here we are!"
Molly's voice pulled TJ from his thinking about what exactly to do next, and as he looked down at all the materials and hides that still needed more attention, he called out to the two teenaged Crafters, "I'm out back! Hope you brought your gloves!"