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Baldur’s Gate 3: Arabella’s Parents Quest Walkthrough

Arabella seemed like the troublemaker of Baldur’s Gate 3, but it seems her parents were no exception. We’ll show you how you find them.

If you decided to help little Arabella in Act 1 and helped her avoid rather…venomous circumstances, you can meet her again in Act 2. No worries, her and her family managed to get into trouble once again.

We’ll try to help you, Arabella! Stay put, we can find your parents.

But wait, where is Arabella?

How to find Arabella

Once you enter Act 2, you will find yourself in the Cursed Shadow Lands. If you want to find Arabella, you will have to go to the west of these Lands.

But don’t forget to pick up a Moon Lantern or Leprechaun’s Blessing before you begin your journey to protect yourself from the curse.

  • but if you are a dungeon master yourself, this would suit you too!

You can find Arabella at the gates of the southern entrance to the cemetery, which is located east of the House of Healing. If you don’t know where the Healing House is yet, it’s west of the Masons Guild.

Starting a conversation with her will reveal that she is looking for her parents. If you have helped Arabella in the past at Druid’s Grove, she will allow you and your party to help her this time as well. You can either tell her to expect you at your camp or at Last Light Inn, but she will refuse the latter and only accept if you ask her to come to your camp.

Once she leaves for your camp, the quest to find Arabella’s parents begins.

How to find Arabella’s parents

Luckily, Arabella’s parents are not far from your current location.

If you go west to the House of Healing, you can find Arabella’s parents in the east wing of the building. The good news is that you’ll find Locke and Komira (those are his parents’ names) lying on two hospital beds, cared for by one of the sisters, Lidwin. The bad news is that they are both dead. Yeah… we can’t change that.

You can choose to talk to Sister Lidwin (don’t worry, she won’t attack you) to learn more about Locke and Komira, or you can attempt to trick Lidwin into selling your party’s healing supplies.

She sells Purple Worm Poison, one of the strongest poisons in the game, so while you can technically choose to kill Lidwin, I wouldn’t recommend it, as you can always come back to her for more poison.

Once you’re done talking to Sister Lidwin, you can choose to leave the healing house, you can stay and explore the rest of the house, which might even give you a little head start for a different side quest .

Small optional side quest

Following the bad news you just heard, you may need to take a moment for yourself to prepare what you are going to say to Arabella. If you wish, you can choose to explore the House of Healing more than you have done so far.

After leaving the east wing of the house, head down the main hallway and look for the operating room at the back of the building.

In the middle of the room, you will find Malus Thorm and some Sisters attending his “conference” on an operation he is currently showing. Be careful not to get too close to Malus at this time, because if you do, a dialogue will automatically pop up that you can’t get out of without a fight.

Now, the goal here is to kill Malus, in order to get an item from him that you will need for the “wake up Art Cullagh” quest. However, to kill him, you don’t necessarily need to fight him.

If you choose to fight him, I’ll give you a warning right here: Malus Thorm has 276 health and will start multi-attacking once his HP reaches 110. If you start a fight with Malus, the four sisters around him will also begin to attack. you and your party.

Now, if you decide not to fight Malus, you can make it easier on yourself by not immediately approaching him to start talking to him. Instead, take a big step around Malus and the sisters and head north to the OR. At the back you will find a small locked room. You can either pick the lock or destroy the door with brute force.

Once opened, head into the room and look for a book called “Surgery and Physiology: A Sharran’s Primer” and read it. This will give you an advantage to avoid having to fight Malus.

As soon as you are done, return to the theater and begin your conversation with Malus. First you’ll have to convince him not to dissect you and your party right away. Do not categorically refuse to be dissected. If you do this, Malus will go mad and immediately start a fight with you.

Once you’ve accomplished that, you can either convince Malus to operate on either the sisters or even himself. If you convince him to have surgery, you won’t have to fight him. Now, this is where the book becomes useful. Trying to convince Malus to have surgery will now have a reduced DC, since you read the book. If you succeed with all your throws, Malus will kill himself (dark, I know) and you can catch the battered lute on Malus’ body.

The beaten lute will be useful for the quest “Wake up Art Cullagh”. Thank me later.

How to break the bad news…

Okay, now where were we? Oh yes, Arabella’s deceased parents, that’s right.

Arabella will be waiting for you at your camp, so once you’re done in the healing house, head there to talk to her. You’ll have to be the bearer of the bad news, and Arabella won’t take it so well at first. She’s pretty shocked, so a good night’s rest will definitely help.

Take a long rest and look for Arabella in the morning. She will talk to another NPC and you will find that she slowly accepts the news. As a thank you for completing her quest, she will give you the Shadow Blade and an uncommon ring.

And with that, you’ve completed the quest to find Arabella’s parents!

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on whether we are creating the first generation with “lower IQ than their parents”


“The ‘digital natives’ are the first children with a lower IQ than their parentsWith that provocative headline, the BBC published a few days ago an interview with Michel Desmurget, a French researcher who has just published in Spain ‘The digital cretin factory’, a book about screens, myths and neuroscience. And, as a journalist, I get it, it’s a round phrase, it has a catch and it works well.

The only problem is that it is not accurate. And it is not something that only I say, Desmurget himself recognizes in his book something that we have been holding for years: that “digital natives” don’t exist. Furthermore, in the same interview, he explains that, “unfortunately, it is not yet possible to determine the specific role of each factor, including for example pollution (especially early exposure to pesticides) or exposure to screens. “

That is to say, Desmurget catches a well known phenomenon: the stagnation of the “Flynn effect” (the steady rise in intelligence scores around the world that researchers have been looking at for more than a century) and relates it to the advent of digital culture, recognizing that it is simply not possible to. It is somewhat striking because his book makes much needed work ‘demolishing’ unjustified myths that try to hide the negative effects of digital culture and screens. Precisely what he does in this interview; but in the opposite direction.

A generation with less IQ than their parents?

Lets start by the beginning. In 1984, New Zealand researcher James R. Flynn realized that curiously Americans’ mean IQ scores had grown “massively” between 1932 and 1978. Picking up on this idea, a few later, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in their controversial book ‘The Bell Curve’ coined the term “Flynn effect” to refer to how the results of intelligence tests rose significantly around the world.

Were we getting smarter? In a technical sense, we could say yes. General intelligence, one of the most curious psychological traits we have found, seemed to be growing year after year in each subset of the world population that we studied. Although it was never really clear what was happening, there are several explanations that were on the table: from improvements in nutrition and sanitation to an improvement in education (or that the trend towards smaller families allowed parents to dedicate more resources to them ), dozens of factors have been proposed to explain this growth.

In 2004, while examining Norwegian intelligence test data between 1950 and 2002, Jon Martin Sundet realized that growth had stalled. This “slowdown” of the Flynn Effect began to be confirmed in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Australia or Iceland; and, indeed, the latest Norwegian studies not only abounded in the idea, but began to point out that, beyond the stagnation, the results were beginning to be worse.

And, as Desmurget finely points out in the interview, we don’t know why either. Thousands of pages have been written about the causes (genetic or environmental) that may have been behind this growth and decline. of the IC throughout the 20th century, but we have not come up with a scheme with which we can agree. What we do know is that this stagnation (and subsequent decline) only affects some specific countries. Meanwhile, globally, the world’s average intelligence continues to grow.

Therefore, although it is imprecise to say that the young people of this generation will have a lower IQ than that of their parents (in most places, that’s just a lie), this is not the biggest problem. Taking into account the future that the most developed countries draw and that IQ has traditionally been considered a key factor in the future well-being of individuals, the biggest problem is that we don’t know why this happens. And, indeed, assigning it to the screens is not an answer: it is simplistic.

To what extent are screens a problem?

However, if we leave the interviews aside and go to his written assignments, Desmurget and I agree on this. Above all, because what interests him is not intelligence. Desmurget is a researcher specialized in cognitive neuroscience who has dedicated several books to the world of screens and how they affect cognitive performance. The first, from 2011, was called ‘TV lobotomie’; the second, which is published now, is called ‘The Digital Cretin Factory’.

He is very aware of what the effects of screens can and cannot explain, and in that sense the book has very interesting findings: for example, it devotes several chapters to demolish popular ideas such as ‘digital natives’ or the belief that technology is always positive for the cognitive development of children and adolescents. In addition, it reviews quite accurately the methodological limitations of the most popular studies that have been put forward in favor of the safety of new technologies. Finally, it does a good summary of arguments against screens (arguments that we will talk about in the near future).

However, often he makes many of the mistakes that he himself points out with the intention of “getting society out of its protechnological dream”. And it is that, although it is true that screens have an impact on the functional and structural development of the brain; Moreover, although we must denounce the ‘myths’ that reject that there may be problems in that digital Arcadia, the truth is that the changes that today’s youth are undergoing go far beyond the screens. Deep down, the world is immersed in a huge social experiment that we do not know where it will take us. Nobody knows, neither those who are in favor, nor those who are against.

So behind all of Desmurget’s inflated rhetoric, what we find is a call to reflection. It’s not that new technologies are making us dumber; but we have to learn to use it for our interests, those of society as a whole. The problem, and in that Desmurget is right, is that it is much easier said than done.

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Valentin, 15, confesses to the murder of his parents: in Châteauvilain, “we think we are living a horror film”


The horror is confirmed and increases a notch every day in Châteauvilain (Isère) where the charred bodies of a couple from the village were found a week ago, in the rubble of their deliberately burned house. Autopsies quickly revealed a violent death by gunshot. The couple’s youngest son, Valentin, who has not been found since the fire, was located and arrested on Saturday by the Montpellier gendarmes (Hérault) as he got off a bus.

From the start of his custody, in the premises of the research section of the Grenoble gendarmerie, the 15-year-old teenager confessed to investigators to having killed his parents. Information confirmed by Éric Vaillant, public prosecutor of Grenoble. Concerning the motive for this crazy gesture, Valentin explained that he wanted to rebuild his life, destroy everything and start again, according to the released Dauphiné. The weapon used would be his father’s rifle, a sports shooting enthusiast. According to a neighbor, Valentin Nurdin learned to use it himself by dragging bottles from the garden.

Many unanswered questions about the trigger

The scenario of the drama therefore begins to become clearer. Monday, November 27, Valentin allegedly shot and killed his parents while they were in their bedroom. He also allegedly attacked the family dog, a border collie found in a pool of blood. Then the teenager allegedly set the house on fire before fleeing in his father’s Citroën Picasso car towards Drôme where the vehicle was discovered damaged in Sainte-Uze. We do not know precisely how he continued his route towards Montpellier.

Today, many questions remain unanswered about the triggering factor of this murderous madness. Hearing his big brother, Titouan (17), at home the previous weekend and leaving the day before the tragedy for Lyon where he studies, will perhaps shed light on the atmosphere reigning in the family circle. Valentin’s psychiatric state is the other major unknown in this case. An expertise could determine the degree of responsibility of the teenager, whom many describe as intelligent. Valentin also suffered from Lyme disease from which he seemed to suffer greatly. His parents tried, in vain, to find remedies abroad.

“He was a kid like any other”

In the meantime, in Châteauvilain (800 inhabitants), we are trying to understand the incomprehensible. The Nurdin farmhouse is located away from the village, in Combe Noire, an isolated valley in the middle of the fields. The agricultural building had been renovated by Isabelle and Didier Nurdin, who arrived 18 years ago. Isabelle came from a family of Parisian cabinetmakers and had set up an armchair renovation workshop in this countryside. Didier was a former international level table tennis player (who was part of the French top 10 in the 90s) and today worked as an engineer at EDF in Lyon.

On the dirt road running alongside the Nurdin property, a few walkers look sadly at the smoke still escaping from the rubble. “It’s inconceivable. Our daughter went to primary school with Valentin. He was a child like any other. We never noticed anything unusual. He was later dropped out of college because he suffered from Lyme disease. That’s why he started correspondence courses. Afterwards, we lost contact with them. »

Police custody which ends this Monday

“Little Valentin, I didn’t know him,” confides Jocelyne, who has lived all her life in Châteauvilain and who, from her windows, has a view of the roof of the burned house. “However, I walk a lot in the countryside, especially near the Nurdin family home. I even have two armchairs that I had restored by his mother with whom I spoke at length. I even went to their house to see his workshop. She worked very well, was very friendly. But we haven’t seen Valentin, even though in the countryside, the children are outside all the time. I didn’t even recognize him in the photo on the wanted poster.

“It upsets us,” says Christelle, a mother from the village. My daughter was scared when she learned what Valentin had done. She thinks she’s living in a horror movie. We thought it was a robbery gone wrong. But there, a son who kills his own parents… It’s confusing. We wonder what was going through his mind. Was it Lyme disease that drove him crazy? »

Valentin Nurdin’s police custody ends this Monday. The Grenoble prosecutor should provide new details on the circumstances of this tragedy. The teenager risks up to 20 years of criminal imprisonment, a sentence taking into account his status as a minor.

gn france

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A factory of digital cretins: on whether we are creating the first generation with “lower IQ than their parents”


“‘Digital Natives’ are the first children with lower IQ than their parents“With that provocative headline, the BBC published a few days ago an interview with Michel Desmurget, a French researcher who has just published in Spain ‘The digital cretin factory’, a book about screens, myths and neuroscience. And, as a journalist, I get it, it’s a round phrase, it has a catch and it works well.

The only problem is that it is not accurate. And it is not something that only I say, Desmurget himself recognizes in his book something that we have been holding for years: that “digital natives” don’t exist. Furthermore, in the same interview, he explains that, “unfortunately, it is not yet possible to determine the specific role of each factor, including for example pollution (especially early exposure to pesticides) or exposure to screens. ”

That is to say, Desmurget catches a well known phenomenon: the stagnation of the “Flynn effect” (the steady rise in intelligence scores around the world that researchers have been looking at for over a century) and relates it to the advent of digital culture, recognizing that it is simply not possible. It is somewhat striking because his book makes much needed work ‘demolishing’ unjustified myths that try to hide the negative effects of digital culture and screens. Precisely what he does in this interview; but in the opposite direction.

A generation with less IQ than their parents?

Lets start by the beginning. In 1984, New Zealand researcher James R. Flynn realized that curiously Americans’ mean IQ scores had grown “massively” between 1932 and 1978. Picking up on this idea, a few later, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in their controversial book ‘The Bell Curve’ coined the term “Flynn effect” to refer to how the results of intelligence tests rose dramatically around the world.


Were we getting smarter? In a technical sense, we could say yes. General intelligence, one of the most curious psychological traits we have found, seemed to be growing year after year in each subset of the world population that we studied. Although it was never really known what was happening, there are several explanations that were on the table: from improvements in nutrition and sanitation to an improvement in education (or that the trend towards smaller families allowed parents to dedicate more resources to them ), dozens of factors have been proposed to explain this growth.


In 2004, while examining Norwegian intelligence test data between 1950 and 2002, Jon Martin Sundet realized that growth had stalled. This “slowdown” of the Flynn Effect began to be confirmed in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Australia or Iceland; And indeed, the latest Norwegian studies not only expanded on the idea, but began to point out that, beyond the stagnation, the results were starting to get worse.


And, as Desmurget finely points out in the interview, we don’t know why either. Thousands of pages have been written about the causes (genetic or environmental) that may have been behind this growth and decline. IQ throughout the 20th century, but we have not come up with a scheme with which we can agree. What we do know is that this stagnation (and subsequent decline) only affects some specific countries. Meanwhile, globally the world’s average intelligence continues to grow.


Therefore, although it is imprecise to say that the young people of this generation will have a lower IQ than that of their parents (in most places, that’s just a lie), this is not the biggest problem. Taking into account the future that the most developed countries draw and that IQ has traditionally been considered a key factor in the future well-being of individuals, the biggest problem is that we don’t know why this happens. And, indeed, assigning it to the screens is not an answer: it is simplistic.


To what extent are screens a problem?

Michel Desmurget

However, if we leave the interviews aside and go to his written assignments, Desmurget and I agree on this. Above all, because what interests him is not intelligence. Desmurget is a researcher specialized in cognitive neuroscience who has dedicated several books to the world of screens and how they affect cognitive performance. The first, from 2011, was called ‘TV lobotomie’; the second, which is published now, is called ‘The Digital Cretin Factory’.


He is well aware of what the effects of screens can and cannot explain and, in that sense, the book has very interesting findings: for example, it devotes several chapters to demolishing popular ideas such as ‘digital natives’ or the belief that technology is always positive for the cognitive development of children and adolescents. In addition, it reviews quite accurately the methodological limitations of the most popular studies that have been put forward in favor of the safety of new technologies. Finally, it does a good summary of arguments against screens (arguments that we will talk about in the near future).

However, often he makes many of the mistakes that he himself points out with the intention of “getting society out of its protechnological dream”. And it is that, although it is true that screens have an impact on the functional and structural development of the brain; Moreover, although we must denounce the ‘myths’ that reject that there may be problems in that digital Arcadia, the truth is that the changes that today’s youth are undergoing go far beyond the screens. Deep down, the world is immersed in a huge social experiment that we do not know where it will take us. Nobody knows, not those who are in favor, nor those who are against.


So behind all of Desmurget’s inflated rhetoric, what we find is a call to reflection. It’s not that new technologies are making us dumber; but we have to learn to use it for our interests, those of society as a whole. The problem, and in that Desmurget is right, is that it is much easier said than done.

Source : Engadget