Grizelda the Hag

n one of his journeys through the woods south of Yew, Hawkeye Pike found some ruins of an old building. In the middle of the decayed house by a fireplace a witch was standing, stirring some mysterious potion in her cauldron. Her name was Grizelda. She looked up from her vile-smelling cauldron and snarled:
"Another of my blasted apprentices has gone missing! Foolish children, think they know everything. I should turn the lot of them into toads - if only they'd return with their task complete! But that's the trouble, innit? They never return! I've had enough troubles with my apprentices, and that vile imp, Zeefzorpul! Why, I bet it's him who's got the lot of them! And who knows what he's done? Vile little thing. If you expect me to help you with your silly little desires, you'll be doing something for me first, eh? I expect you to go seek out my apprentice. I sent him along the road west of here up towards Yew's graveyard, but he never came back. Find him, and bring him back, and I'll give you a little reward that I'm sure you'll find pleasant. But I tells ye to watch out for the imp name've Zeefzorpul! He's a despicable littel beast who likes to fool and fiddle with folk and generally make life miserable for everyone."
Hawkeye was up for an adventure and decided to accept this task. He took the road leading north to the Yew graveyard looking around carefully.

As he rode for a few minutes, Hawkeye noticed a charred corpse on the middle of the road. Was that one of Grizeldas apprentices? But as soon as he got nearer, suddenly Zeefzorpul the imp appeared, took a scrap of paper from the bodie and vanished. Hawkeye cursed! Gizelda wouldn't like this news! When he returned to he hag, she was not at all happy about what had happened. She said "Zeefzorpul must have found out that I sent my apprentices out with various magic brew recipies. I need you to find Zeefzorpul and get the scrap of parchment back!" Thus she gave the pirate the next appointment, which was slaying a few imps until he would find one who knew the secret hiding place of Zeefzorpul.

Hawkeye traveled to the desert area in the northern part of the Lost Lands to do as requested. Among some Wyverns and Stone Gargoyles he killed four or five Imps. One of them had a map and a magic flute with him, which was said to help summon Zeefzorpul the imp.

The pirate read the map carefully and finally found a cave near Destard which seemed to match the paper.

He played the flute and Zeefzorpul suddenly appeared out of nowhere, complaining about the unreliability of his fellow imp who gave away the flute to a stranger. He took the flute, gave a list of magic brew ingredients to Hawkeye Pike and vanished again.

When Hawkeye returned to Grizelda, she was pleased and asked him to now find the ingredients from the list, which were Mongbat Wings, Slime Ooze and Bones burried in hallowed ground. One by one Hawkeye Pike gathered those ingredients by slaying Mongbats, killing Slimes and digging out the bones from some graveyard in Britannia using a shovel.
When he finally returned to Grizelda getting her the last ingredient, she rewarded him with a bag full of nice items, like a cauldron, a bottle of magical moonfire brew, a treasure map, 2000 gold pieces and some other things. Hawkeye had spent a lot of time on this quest. It had been just the right thing for his knight erranty.

12/2007

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