Part 5 of the How He Got Here series
Part of the arc: Unclegrumble Origin Story
Goblin engineering doesn’t get tested for longevity. It gets tested for whether it works on the day, and Sprizzle’s Greener Pastures had cleared that bar with room to spare, which was the full extent of anyone’s quality control. What it hadn’t been built for was holding steady over weeks and months, and it started showing that the way cheap goblin tech always shows its age: not with a clean break, but with a flicker. Some hours he was fully the orc, Orgrimmar solid under his feet. Other hours, for no reason he could ever identify, he’d surface back in his own gnome body in Dalaran, disoriented, present for a few minutes or a few hours before the pull dragged him back under again.
A discipline priest found him during one of those windows — one of the Forsaken, working the Underbelly long before any of this, patching up people who’d rather not explain how they got hurt, in the one corner of Dalaran where nobody official kept close track of who needed patching up in the first place. She caught him mid-surface: gnome, present, thoroughly confused about where he’d just come back from. She’d worn a version of that confusion herself once, in the stretch after her own raising, before whatever had been done to her finally let go and left her her own again. She recognized it immediately.
She didn’t try to fix the flickering itself. There was nothing to point a prayer at — no wound, no injury, just an unstable connection doing what unstable connections do. What she did instead was keep turning up during his gnome windows, specifically, talking to him for as long as each one lasted. Conversation, mostly one-sided, the kind that doesn’t ask much of the person on the other end of it. And the windows got longer. Whether that was her doing, or just the Greener Pastures continuing to degrade on its own schedule, he’s never worked out and never much tried to.
He woke up fully himself one morning, sober, in the same Dalaran gutter he’d never actually left. She was there. She told him she loved him, either that same morning or close enough to it that the two events sit side by side in his memory now, order unclear, both simply true.
He moved to Stormwind not long after — his own decision, the plan he’d always meant to follow before any of this happened. She stayed in Tirisfal Glades, near Undercity, where an undead Forsaken belonged without anyone asking questions about it. What grew between them from there was real love and real passion, and UG, a gnome built for tinkering and drink and not much else, had to learn how to carry a love that would have been a lot for a man twice his height. He struggled with it, honestly and often, and kept carrying it anyway.
They found what places they could. The Lion’s Pride Inn in Goldshire sometimes, close enough for him to reach easily, well known for asking no questions of anyone passing through. Sometimes further north, past Tirisfal, up near the haunted bluffs around Shadowfang Keep — Horde ground, dangerous for an Alliance gnome caught wandering it, and he went anyway, because the choice was never really a choice at all. Always after dark, both directions.
Whatever kept running in Orgrimmar carries on there still, on its own terms, the same as it always would have. UG has no way back into it and has never gone looking for one.
More in the How He Got Here series
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