Part 3 of the How He Got Here series

Part of the arc: Unclegrumble Origin Story

Dalaran pulled him the same way Zul’Gurub had — restlessness with nowhere left to point itself, once the city rose again over Northrend and every tavern in Stormwind had something to say about it. It was neutral ground, floating, packed with more happening at once than the Mage Quarter had ever managed. He went. He stayed longer than planned, same as always.

The Underbelly was three floors under the polished streets, goblin-run, openly called the worst part of the city by people who’d never set foot in it. Every official notice UG had ever read telling him to stay somewhere else had only ever functioned as directions. He went down.

Sprizzle Cogwhistle was collecting a debt that evening, and the Steamwheedle Cartel property on the table beside her — a “Greener Pastures” unit, Mark II, stamped and manufactured out of Gadgetzan, nobody ever explaining what had happened to the Mark I — was the threat behind it — pay up, or find out what the alternative looks like. Every debtor who’d already found out came back changed, one of two ways, and both ways kept them paying. Show someone a life worse than their own, and they come back grateful, terrified of how close they’d come to losing what little they actually had, first in line to settle up. Show someone a life better than their own, and they come back aching for it instead, resentful of every hour spent back in the life they’re stuck with — miserable, but miserable in a way that makes a person work twice as hard to protect what’s left rather than risk losing more of it. The firm behind the Greener Pastures had worked out, through however many debtors it took to prove it, that there was no version of the demonstration that left anyone unbothered enough to fall behind on a payment again. It was a proven method with a perfect track record, and it did more damage than a blade ever could have.

Properly done, this sort of work belongs to the bronze dragonflight. Keeping timeways straight, untangled, and safely quarantined from the main line is more or less their entire purpose as a species — patient, exact, answerable to nobody’s invoice but their own. The Greener Pastures was a goblin knockoff, built by people who’d clearly gotten close enough to real bronze dragonflight technology to understand roughly what it did without ever being trusted with the part where you do it safely. Where a proper timeways working locates a thread with surgical precision and touches it as lightly as possible, the Greener Pastures simply grabbed the nearest one running close enough to reach and forced a connection open, the way you’d force a lock rather than find the key. It worked. Gentle was never the design brief, and nobody who built it had lost any sleep over that.

This particular debtor’s account got settled before it came to that. The muscle sent to collect in person had done the job too well — laid up for a fortnight, the debt paid out of what he owned before the Greener Pastures ever left the table. Which left Sprizzle holding a live device with no debtor left to threaten, and UG standing close enough to ask about it.

“You want to see how it works?”

He said yes the way he said yes to everything: immediately, delighted, no interest whatsoever in what it might actually do to him. She turned the device on, and somewhere out on a timeway that had split off long before, an orc already going by Unclegrumble found a stranger’s mind threaded into the back of his own.

His first thought, in the half-second before the connection actually landed, was regret — not about the danger, which hadn’t fully occurred to him yet, but about the angle. He’d been standing wrong to actually see how the device worked from the inside, and it bothered him more than it probably should have that he was about to lose consciousness without getting a proper look at the mechanism.

Nobody was watching the clock on this one, and nobody had ever built the Greener Pastures for anything longer than a supervised demonstration. The connection simply stayed open, with no debtor’s fear left to manage and no reason for Sprizzle to touch it again once the invoice was settled another way.

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