If you choose to go through the mountain pass in Act 1 of Baldur’s Gate 3 or just double back to it like I did, then there’s a good chance you’ll bump into Lady Esther. The silver-haired adventurer will ask you to nab an egg from the nearby Githyanki Creche, but should you actually do it?
Like many things in Baldur’s Gate 3, there’s no perfect question to that answer. Me? I chose to just ignore the egg on my first playthrough, because I’m not a damned kidnapper. I did wind up killing all the Githyanki in the Creche, however, essentially leaving the egg orphaned. However, I must insist that I’m not evil. My morals are merely flexible, and I don’t often consider the consequences of my actions, nor do I take responsibility.
Instead, I’ll tell you how to get the egg and what happens if you hand it over to Lady Esther. This contains spoilers.
Once again, you find Lady Esther at her camp on the way to the Githyanki Creche in Rosymorn Monastery. Talk to her, and she’ll quickly insist that you steal an egg from the Creche – for science! The Society of Brilliance wants to learn if Githyanki can be deprogrammed to live in polite society. I told her she was stupid, and she got offended and attacked, so she died.
However, I still went down to the Creche. It sounded like a bad idea, which meant I was curious to see how badly I could sink myself into trouble. Things certainly went downhill, and before I knew it, I was cutting a thorough and bloody escape. Once everyone was dead, I chose to explore the hatchery in the Northwest of the Creche. It’s filled with acid and contains exactly one egg at the far end of the rather large room, something that Lae’zel says isn’t normal. The single egg, I mean. I think the acid is a standard nursery decoration.
You can get to the egg with some tricky teleportation and ledge jumping, but if you kill Varsh Ko’kuu, they’ll drop a pair of boots that makes you immune to the acid. You should still be careful, however, as there are other traps in the acid that your boots won’t protect you from.
Alternatively
On the other hand, while I went the trusty murder route, you can also apparently talk Varsh Ko’kuu into just giving you the egg. Your character better have a silver tongue because convincing someone to give up their child isn’t easy. If talking doesn’t work, on the other hand, at least you can always fall back to murder.
Once you have the egg, you can take it back to Esther and trade it for 449 gold. The consequence of this is that it makes its way to Baldur’s Gate and is given to Havkelaag, a dwarf who hatches the egg, speeds up the child’s aging, and then gets killed by the teenaged Githyanki, because his methods weren’t very well thought out. Some brilliance.
On the other hand, you can also keep the egg. If you choose to hold onto the egg, it can be sold to Havkelaag directly for 1000 gold.
If, for some reason, you respect Lae’zel and her people, you can keep it through to the end of the game, it will hatch sometime before the epilogue. In the epilogue, Lae’zel will tell you that the egg hatched a child she named “Xan.”
If, like me, you don’t even pick up the egg, then nothing happens. One can simply assume that it sits in that pool of acid until it hatches, is adopted by another Githyanki, or gets stolen by someone else and is served sunnyside up.
