5th August 2026

Part 3 of the Nobbybanks series

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.

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More in the Nobbybanks series

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