Liesel Hartmann

Overview

Fräulein Liesel Hartmann is a 28-year-old nurse who serves the Brotherhood in victim care and management. She administers sedatives, monitors vital signs, and comforts the “volunteers” during their stay at the sealed anatomical theatre. She genuinely believes she is caring for terminally ill patients in an experimental medical program who have volunteered to “donate their bodies to science.”

Liesel is the most compassionate member of the Brotherhood — the only one who still sees the victims as human beings deserving of care and dignity. This compassion is built on a foundation of lies, but it is genuine nonetheless.

Physical Description

A handsome woman of middle height with kind brown eyes and dark hair worn in a practical nurse’s arrangement. She dresses in simple, clean clothes suitable for nursing work — aprons, sturdy shoes, sleeves always rolled up. Her bearing suggests someone comfortable with medical work and with physical comfort of others. She moves with quiet efficiency.

Personality

Compassionate, conscientious, and genuinely devoted to her patients’ comfort. Liesel is motivated by the desire to help those suffering. She is intelligent enough to be good at nursing but not sophisticated enough to question Herzfeld’s explanations. She has constructed a narrative in which she is performing an act of mercy.

Key Traits:

• Compassion: Genuine care for those she perceives as suffering
• Conscientiousness: Meticulous in her duties
• Naiveté: Accepts Herzfeld’s explanation without critical examination
• Humanity: Treats the victims with dignity and kindness despite their true circumstances

Session Appearances

Liesel can be encountered if the party reaches the sealed anatomical theatre or the medical wing during the assault. She is present at the University continuously from approximately 9 August onward (the lockdown prevents her from leaving). Her presence complicates direct assault on the medical wing. If the assault team passes through her corridor without converting or neutralising her, she becomes an unpredictable element behind their line of advance.

Session 8 Update — First In-Play Appearance (August 8, 1814)

Liesel’s first in-play appearance happened on the night of the Grand Masquerade, not at the theatre but at the masquerade itself. She was present in service livery (a quiet, plausibly explicable cover for a nurse making an off-site appointment) and approached Varrio directly, asking after a man named Brenner.

What Happened

• Liesel made the approach herself. She was not summoned, threatened, or escorted — she chose, on her own initiative, to find a member of the party in the middle of a public ball and ask a question. This is the first canonical evidence that her faith in Herzfeld’s narrative is already cracking before the party has had to confront her with anything.
• The name she gave was Brenner. This is Dr. Wilhelm Brenner — the defected Brotherhood surgeon whom Varrio personally killed in a Leopoldstadt boarding house on the night of 4 August 1814. Liesel does not know that Brenner is dead. She does not know that the man she is asking is the man who killed him.
• Why she is asking after Brenner: Brenner spent eighteen months in hiding before his death, drinking, half-mad with guilt, occasionally surfacing in the city. As a nurse working at the Sealed Anatomical Theatre, Liesel almost certainly knew him from the Brotherhood’s University days — Brenner was a senior surgical figure inside the Brotherhood before he broke. He may have visited her, written to her, or simply been a colleague she remembered. Whichever — she has noticed that he has been missing for several days now and she is asking the wrong people about it in the right places.
• Varrio’s response is canonical to the Keeper’s read of the encounter, but the dramatic weight is fixed: the murderer of the man she is looking for is standing in front of her, and neither of them yet realises the symmetry. What Varrio chooses to tell her — the truth, a deflection, a careful half-answer — defines the next stage of Liesel’s arc and the next stage of Varrio’s secret.

Where the Wächter Attack Found Her

Liesel’s location during the Wächter attack is not yet established in canon. The most plausible options:

• Already withdrawn. Her tradecraft is non-existent and her conversation with Varrio would have been brief; she may have been heading for a side exit when the first creature came through the glass.
• Still on the floor. If she lingered to watch Varrio’s reaction or to overhear the room, she may have been in the ballroom proper when the attack began. A nurse with no combat training in a room full of trampling aristocrats and an inhuman creature is in extreme danger.
• In the corridors. The same servants’ corridors the party used for Anna’s extraction are the corridors a nurse in service livery would use. She may be ahead of the corridor cluster, behind it, or moving past it in either direction.

The Keeper should pick whichever placement makes Liesel most useful for Session 9. The strongest narrative option is that she survives the night and seeks out the party again within the next 24 hours — having now seen, with her own eyes, a creature she cannot explain away as terminal medicine.

Session 13 — The Assault (12 August 1814, pre-dawn)

The rescue team — Adrien, Katherine, Nell, and Ferrante’s Sardinians — found Liesel mopping the hallway outside Caroline’s room in the south corridor. The Sardinians moved quickly, restraining and silencing her before she could react. Adrien recognised her as someone he had seen speaking with Varrio at a previous social event. She was tied, gagged, and bundled into a nearby cupboard.