The story of Grete
After our heroes found Grete’s hut in the Sulphur Ponds two weeks ago, a gruesome discovery awaited them. In the cave adjacent to the hut, they found not only various bones, but also a wide variety of metal instruments and Grete’s crude notes. Understandably, they didn’t exactly sleep soundly that night. The next morning, they look at each other tiredly and yawn competitively.
After Aldric is the first to peel himself out of his makeshift bed, the other three slowly but surely get up. After a leisurely breakfast, they really don’t feel like staying here any longer, so they decide together to quickly finish inspecting Grete’s cave. With Theo’s help, they open the metal door again and enter the dark cave one after the other.
Just like the previous evening, they light up the room with various torches and explore Grete’s documents more closely. They quickly find another excerpt from her diary. From this, they learn that Grete carried out various animal experiments. First, she tried to open the skulls of the animals while keeping them alive. To this end, she collected various plants on the Kresto Plateau to test their effects on living creatures. For further experiments, she then moved to the sulphur ponds and developed an extract that calmed living creatures and kept them alive despite their open skulls. She described the animals as puppets that could be moved according to her wishes.
A shudder spread among our four heroes, but somehow they are also captivated by the eerie story, so Aldric continues reading. After Grete had optimised her experiments on animals, she began to kidnap her former tormentors from Feth one by one. She used her novel anaesthetic potion for this as well, leaving behind pearls as clues to her whereabouts. She learned to use the potion on humans as well and, with the help of metal armour, developed a kind of costume for her prisoners that gave her complete control over her victims. Under the influence of the potion, she was able to keep people alive and control them.
As a grand finale, she then kidnapped her former love from Feth: Telohren. Here, the diary ends with the words: ‘You have always accompanied me, my dear diary, but today I have finally found my partner for life!’ Disturbed, our friends look at each other and then at the skull in the metal armour, whose origin they now know. They collect all the skulls and decide to take them back to Feth to give their loved ones a place to mourn. They also search the cave for other items that might be useful to them. Theo, for example, finds the recipes for the potions from the potion puzzle, and the others also pack a few useful items.
After packing everything up, they’ve had enough of Grete and want nothing more than to leave. They pack up their sleeping rolls and leave the small wooden hut. Their next destination is now Feth, not only to return the skulls, but also to finally sleep in a proper bed again.
As the little hut disappears behind them in the haze of the sulphur ponds, our heroes quickly realise that this hike is going to be tough. The sulphurous air stinks and weighs heavily on their lungs. Slowly and panting, they work their way forward kilometre by kilometre. Although the hike demands everything from them physically, the ponds are fascinating in their own way. There is no living creature in sight, only a heavy, yellowish mist drifting over the dead pools and gnarled trees. The deathly silence causes each of our four heroes to fall into their own thoughts, and so they hike on in silence, hour after hour.
Out of nowhere, Löwenzahn’s ‘Look, over there!’ breaks the silence. Startled, his three friends look in the direction his outstretched index finger is pointing. ‘What is that?’ Theo whispers. But you’ll have to wait until the next Arkanthia Pen and Paper to find out what Löwenzahn has just discovered.
