Fittz Toggletorque
Fittz Toggletorque was born in Gnomeregan to common folk, the son of a jeweler and his wife, and nothing in that beginning suggested the long and improbable life that would follow. His father worked in small precious things: metal, cut stones, settings, and patient detail. Fittz inherited more than a gnome’s natural curiosity from him. He inherited the habit of looking closely, of assuming that even the tiniest object might hide a mechanism, a memory, or a catastrophe waiting for the proper nudge.
The one thing Fittz carried from that early life longer than any other was an ancient gnomish coin his father had set with a mana gem, a parting gift for a son bound for magical study in Dalaran. It had a square hole through its center, and began as a keepsake before becoming an experiment. Then it became many experiments. Over decades, perhaps over more than a century, Fittz practiced enchantment upon that coin again and again, layering spellwork over spellwork until no sane cataloguer of magical objects would have dared call it orderly. By then, order was no longer the point. The coin had become sentimental, whimsical, useful, dangerous, and very nearly alive in the way only over-enchanted gnomish heirlooms can seem alive.
Fittz can flip the coin while channeling magic through it and awaken one of the enchantments buried in its impossible little history. Most of the results are beneficial. Many are surprising. A few are only beneficial if one possesses Fittz’s optimism and a generous definition of success. He can nudge the outcome, sometimes even strongly, but never perfectly. That uncertainty is part of the coin’s power and, if anyone asks Fittz, part of its charm. In later years, he learned to command one function reliably, expanding the coin into a hovering platform that could carry him at great speed over considerable distances. Even then, he treated it as a personal conveyance, not a replacement for portals, airships, flight masters, or common sense, though witnesses might dispute how often common sense was involved.
By the time Gnomeregan fell, Fittz was already an old man living in Dalaran. His parents had long since died naturally, and his sole sibling, a sister, was safe in Dalaran as well. His life had become bound to the Kirin Tor, to scholarship, to adventure, and to the kind of work that makes ordinary people ask whether a gnome is entirely safe to leave unsupervised. The fall of his homeland wounded him, certainly. He knew people who died there, and others who were changed forever in the disaster and the long attempts to reclaim what had been lost. Yet Gnomeregan’s fall was not the defining wound of his life. Fittz grieved it as an old son of the city, not as a man whose whole house had vanished in a single hour.
In Dalaran, Fittz became many things at once: beloved eccentric, brilliant headache, and, eventually, respected institution. He was a professor for a time, specializing in teleportation, and quite literally wrote the textbook on the subject. Students learned quickly that his lectures might wander, his demonstrations might become alarming, and his warnings about spatial miscalculation were funnier before one saw the diagrams. Yet beneath the jokes sat real rigor. Fittz understood distance, position, momentum, and magical displacement not as abstractions, but as a musician understands rhythm. He could feel where a spell wanted to arrive.
That mastery shaped his combat style. As a younger mage, Fittz favored close-range chaos of the most academic kind: vanishing from one point in a battle and reappearing in another, releasing a sudden burst of arcane force around himself, then disappearing again before the enemy could decide whether to panic, swing, or look down. It was reckless in appearance, precise in practice, and extremely irritating to anything trying to kill him. Even during the northern war against the Lich King, when he was no longer young by any generous standard, Fittz was renowned among some airship crews in Icecrown for stepping cheerfully off the deck, vanishing in midair, and blinking downward into masses of undead, where flashes of arcane violence would begin erupting through the swarm.
Age refined him without entirely civilizing him. In later years, Fittz developed a method of striking enemies with arcane blasts that accumulated unstable entropic feedback, building pressure within the target and the surrounding magical field until he could release it in a further, devastating collapse of force. It was elegant, dangerous, and very Fittz: a spellcraft theory that looked like battlefield mischief until the moment it tore the enemy’s formation apart.
For all his levity, Fittz was never frivolous. He could be serious, thoughtful, even pensive, especially when speaking of old students, lost cities, or the strange burden of outliving so many disasters. But he rarely let solemnity become gloom. Cheer, to him, was not denial. It was courtesy, defiance, and occasionally tactics. A smile could steady a frightened apprentice, annoy a pompous archmage, or make an enemy underestimate him for the last mistake of its life.
Fittz never married and left no children behind him. He had, as some of his students liked to say, married the work and run away with the adventure. He did not deny it. There were worse arrangements, and considerably less interesting ones.
In the northern war, Fittz stood among the champions who brought down the Lich King, fighting alongside Cairden Morrivar, Aibhinger Greyhammer, Mourgrim, and others in the final struggle at Icecrown. From that war came one of the most enduring friendships of his long life. Cairden, Aibh, and Fittz were very different men, but each had seen enough of the others under impossible pressure to know what lay beneath habit and reputation. Cairden respected Fittz’s mind and power enough to tolerate the eccentricities. Aibh understood the value of a cheerful voice in a hard place. Fittz, for his part, gained two friends he could trust with terrible matters, and occasionally with excellent jokes at terrible moments.
When the mists around Pandaria cleared, Fittz went with the Alliance into that newly opened land and later took part in the Siege of Orgrimmar beside old comrades. During the Third Invasion of the Burning Legion, he rose still higher, leading the reformed Tirisgarde, attaining the rank of Archmage within the Kirin Tor, and taking a seat among its ruling council. It suited him poorly in some ways and perfectly in others. He had never been fond of stiffness, but he understood responsibility, and by then even his critics had to admit that Fittz Toggletorque was no mere eccentric survivor. He was one of the finest arcane minds of his age.
When Cairden founded Morrivar Company, Fittz joined immediately. By then Cairden was one of his oldest friends, and Fittz needed little persuasion to lend his name, counsel, and spellwork to the effort. He became a senior figure in the Company’s inner circle, an archmage adviser and architect of its arcane logistics, helping design the portal systems and magical infrastructure that allowed the organization to move, communicate, and survive like something larger than a band of champions.
By that stage of life, Fittz rarely entered the field unless the need was serious. When he did, enemies expecting a harmless old gnome learned their error quickly. Fittz Toggletorque could arrive with a smile, flip a coin older than some kingdoms, and turn a battlefield into a lesson in applied arcane theory. Usually, he was even kind enough to laugh while doing it.