5th August 2026

Part 1 of the Nobbybanks series

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.

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More in the Nobbybanks series

Next: II. The Boring One →