Money, Money, Money

The ledger over the blade, one good year out of twenty, and a number he’s been avoiding for longer than he’d like to admit.

I. Knives

Every gnome who made it out of Gnomeregan seems to want to talk about it eventually, at length, usually more than once, and Nobbybanks has never had the patience for it. Not out of coldness. He’s sat through enough of those conversations secondhand to know exactly how they go, and exactly how much they cost the person telling them, and he’d simply rather not be one more ear demanding the retelling. So when he met a gnome who’d walked out of the same disaster and seemed, against every reasonable expectation, unbothered by discussing it — more interested in the gates of Ironforge than in his own survival story — Nobbybanks found that considerably more interesting than the survival story would have been. It’s most of why they became friends in the first place. Unclegrumble was the first gnome he’d met who didn’t need the conversation, because he’d apparently never had it with himself either.

Nobbybanks has no memory of Gnomeregan at all, for the simple reason that he was never there. He has always been Ironforge-born, and was already an adult doing business there decades before Gnomeregan fell — old enough that when the call went out, right after the Second War, for gnomish engineers willing to help drive a tunnel clean through the mountains to Stormwind, he was there to hear it firsthand. Nobbybanks wasn’t an engineer. He was, even then, a gnome who understood that somebody building something ambitious would eventually need money more urgently than they needed ideas, and he put a modest sum into the tram’s construction on the confident assumption that a project that large would turn a return eventually.

It did not occur to him, until considerably too late to do anything about it, that a tram built specifically to move soldiers and supplies for free was never going to turn a profit for anybody, least of all the gnome who’d bankrolled a few hundred feet of track under the questionable belief that infrastructure was the same thing as investment. He has been living that mistake down for longer than most gnomes have been alive, Unclegrumble included, which puts a decade count on him that he generally prefers not to state directly.

Which is, if he’s honest with himself, most of why he calls him Uncle in the first place. Nobbybanks has never offered an explanation for the nickname to anyone who’s asked, mostly because the real one embarrasses him slightly — Unclegrumble is not older than him. Not remotely. But he has the quality Nobbybanks always wished an uncle of his own might have had: turning up unannounced, treating a disaster as an opportunity to go looking at something interesting, without ever making anyone sit through the retelling of how bad things used to be. Nobbybanks never had an uncle like that. He decided he’d simply appoint one instead.

What he does have, on top of all that, is a family trade — and the family trade is knives.

The gnomes who raised him were rogues going back further than anyone had bothered writing down, recruited generation after generation into an arrangement that ran, distantly and through several intermediaries nobody discussed directly, back to the Uncrowned — the sort of organization that describes itself, when it bothers describing itself at all, as the unseen hand writing the true history of the world, which is a lot of pressure to put on a family that mostly specialized in relieving dwarves of their coin purses. Every gnome in the line got the same start: a blade, a lesson in not being seen, and an unspoken expectation that they’d grow into something worth being afraid of.

Nobbybear, his younger cousin, took to it immediately. He had the instincts, the nerve, and — for reasons the family has stopped trying to explain to outsiders — a bear hat he refuses to remove even for formal occasions, on the theory that it makes him look more dangerous. It does not. Nobbybear remains, to this day, the only gnome Nobbybanks has ever met who can walk into a room wearing the head of a taxidermied bear and still be taken seriously five minutes later, purely through force of personality.

Nobbybanks got the same start Nobbybear did. He listened to the same lessons, held the same knives, absorbed the same unspoken expectation. What actually caught his attention, in the middle of all of it, was a single offhand mention from a training instructor about the ledgers — that a rogue’s real value was never just the blade. It was information. Leverage. Knowing what a thing was worth before the person selling it did.

Nobbybanks turned twelve different shades of interested at that sentence and never fully turned back.

II. The Boring One

The family took it well, in the sense that nobody said anything directly, and badly, in the sense that everyone’s silence made it very clear what they thought.

There was a path available to him, once his instructors noticed where his attention actually lived. The Uncrowned run more than knife-work — deep in Dalaran‘s Underbelly, in the Hall of Shadows, sits a market that doesn’t officially exist, dealing in items that don’t officially exist either, moved by people who very much do. Nobbybanks was offered a seat at that table. A real one. Black Market trading — connected, dangerous, exactly in keeping with a family that had spent generations building a reputation nobody was supposed to be able to name out loud.

He turned it down.

Not out of caution, though everyone assumed caution at the time and he’s never corrected them. He turned it down because he did the numbers privately, the way he does most things, and worked out that the ordinary, fully legal Auction House — taxed, regulated, visible to anyone who cared to look — moved more volume in a single afternoon than the Black Market managed in a week of careful secrecy. The secrecy was the expensive part. Nobody was paying a premium for the thrill of it once you accounted for what the thrill actually cost.

Nobbybear heard about the decision and didn’t speak to him for a month. It wasn’t the legality that offended him. It was the lack of ambition. “You had a seat at the real table,” he said, eventually, breaking the silence only to make his disappointment official, “and you chose the boring one.” He was wearing the bear hat at the time. Nobbybanks has never been able to take the sentiment fully seriously since.

III. The Lean Years

The years that followed were, on the whole, unremarkable.

He traded. He lost more than he won, most weeks, in amounts small enough not to matter and frequent enough to add up anyway. He bought ore in bulk and smelted it himself at the Great Forge, having worked out early that the margin on finished bars beat raw stone by enough to justify the walk, and having worked out slightly later that walking down to Redridge or Loch Modan to actually mine the stuff himself was, for a gnome of his priorities, a waste of a perfectly good afternoon he could otherwise spend at the Auction House watching prices move. He has not swung a mining pick in his life. He considers this a point of professional consistency rather than laziness, and has never convinced anyone else of the distinction.

He also, somewhere in that long unremarkable stretch, ended up in Stormwind.

The details of how remain disputed even in his own retelling, which changes slightly depending on how much he’s had to drink and how recently Nobbybear has brought it up to embarrass him. What’s agreed on is that he got there, and that simply being there — walking the streets, breathing the air, existing in a city with quests hanging off every second lamppost — was enough on its own. He hadn’t fought anything. He hadn’t needed to. His own strength crept upward regardless, purely as a side effect of having shown up, which most people would treat as good news.

Nobbybanks did not treat it as good news. He treated it as a wildly unwelcome complication, the professional equivalent of accidentally gaining ground in a career he’d specifically arranged his whole life to avoid needing to have, and he was back through the tram to Ironforge within the hour, considerably stronger and considerably more annoyed about it than the achievement usually warrants.

He has not left again since. He tells people this is a scheduling issue. It is not a scheduling issue.

IV. Everyone Else Went Exploring

For most of two decades, the schemes came and went, and none of them worked.

There was the tabard-reselling venture, which collapsed the week fashions changed. There was the elixir stockpile, bought heavy on a rumour that turned out to be someone else’s joke. There was a run at cornering the market on a crafting reagent that three separate patches obsoleted without warning before he’d finished moving half his stock. Nobbybanks kept a ledger of every one of these, in his own tidy hand, filed under a heading he has never let anyone else read the title of. He maintains, to this day, that the ledger is educational rather than embarrassing. Nobbybear has offered, more than once and unhelpfully, to read it aloud at the next family gathering.

Then the Dragon Isles opened, and Nobbybanks did the one thing that ever actually worked: nothing.

Everyone he knew went — Unclegrumble first among them, gone within the week, chasing whatever new thing had caught his attention this time. Nobbybanks stayed exactly where he’d always been, at the counter, and watched a whole continent’s worth of ore and herbs come pouring through the Auction House at prices set by adventurers who had absolutely no idea what any of it was actually worth, too busy exploring to check. He bought everything undervalued. He sold everything overvalued. He did this, patiently, for months, while half of Azeroth was off discovering dragons, and came out the other side of it with more gold than every previous scheme of his life combined, several times over.

It remains, to date, the only successful thing he has ever done. He has spent every year since trying to work out how to do it again, on the theory that a strategy that worked once must be repeatable if he just thinks about it hard enough. It has not been repeatable. Nothing since has come close, and he has stopped mentioning the Dragon Isles by name in front of Nobbybear, who has never let him forget exactly how much of that fortune came from doing nothing at all.

V. The Number He Hasn’t Looked At

The bank gnomes of Ironforge exist, officially, as an operation with a name, a headquarters, and a motto. Unofficially, the operation is mostly Nobbybanks, a very tidy set of ledgers, and — since Nobbybear insisted the outfit needed one — a motto Nobbybanks has come to regret approving in a weak moment: Money, Money, Money!, borrowed wholesale from a talking toy cowboy’s piggy bank and delivered, every single time, with a straight face that fools nobody. He tells people it’s ironic. He is the only one who thinks so.

What he doesn’t advertise, in the ledgers or anywhere else, is how much of his one good fortune has gone into a tower out at Founder’s Point.

It started small, the way these things do — a loan here, a favour there, the kind of gaps a friend fills without doing the maths on it too closely. He has never done the maths on it too closely. That’s rather the problem. Somewhere in the last few years the gaps stopped being gaps and started being a pattern, a steady drain running out of the fortune he built exactly once and has never managed to build again, and every time he’s come close to actually adding it up, he’s found something more comfortable to do instead — smelt a batch of ore, check the Auction House, argue with Nobbybear about the hat.

He isn’t ready to call it a problem yet. He’s aware, in the vague, avoidant way a person is aware of a letter they haven’t opened, that the number is larger than it should be, and that Unclegrumble‘s tower has, gradually and without any single moment he could point to, become the single biggest line item in an account that was never supposed to have one. He tells himself he’ll look at it soon. He has been telling himself that for a while now.

Nobbybear thinks he should just go collect. Nobbybanks tells him it’s not that simple. Nobbybear, adjusting his bear hat, tends to say that it sounds exactly that simple, actually, and Nobbybanks tends to change the subject at that point, back to the ledgers, back to the numbers he can still control, and away from the one number he’s been avoiding the longest.