5th August 2026

Part 5 of the Nobbybanks series

The bank gnomes of Ironforge exist, officially, as an operation with a name, a headquarters, and a motto. Unofficially, the operation is mostly Nobbybanks, a very tidy set of ledgers, and — since Nobbybear insisted the outfit needed one — a motto Nobbybanks has come to regret approving in a weak moment: Money, Money, Money!, borrowed wholesale from a talking toy cowboy’s piggy bank and delivered, every single time, with a straight face that fools nobody. He tells people it’s ironic. He is the only one who thinks so.

What he doesn’t advertise, in the ledgers or anywhere else, is how much of his one good fortune has gone into a tower out at Founder’s Point.

It started small, the way these things do — a loan here, a favour there, the kind of gaps a friend fills without doing the maths on it too closely. He has never done the maths on it too closely. That’s rather the problem. Somewhere in the last few years the gaps stopped being gaps and started being a pattern, a steady drain running out of the fortune he built exactly once and has never managed to build again, and every time he’s come close to actually adding it up, he’s found something more comfortable to do instead — smelt a batch of ore, check the Auction House, argue with Nobbybear about the hat.

He isn’t ready to call it a problem yet. He’s aware, in the vague, avoidant way a person is aware of a letter they haven’t opened, that the number is larger than it should be, and that Unclegrumble‘s tower has, gradually and without any single moment he could point to, become the single biggest line item in an account that was never supposed to have one. He tells himself he’ll look at it soon. He has been telling himself that for a while now.

Nobbybear thinks he should just go collect. Nobbybanks tells him it’s not that simple. Nobbybear, adjusting his bear hat, tends to say that it sounds exactly that simple, actually, and Nobbybanks tends to change the subject at that point, back to the ledgers, back to the numbers he can still control, and away from the one number he’s been avoiding the longest.

---

More in the Nobbybanks series

← Previous: IV. Everyone Else Went Exploring