5th August 2026

Part 4 of the Nobbybanks series

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.

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More in the Nobbybanks series

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