"Dear Piddly," Read the letter.
Piddly has just been handed a yellowed envelope that contained a letter. The handwriting was spidery and hard to read, and the napkin on which it was written was soft and covered in what looked like barbecue sauce.
Flipping the mailman a silver coin, Piddly quickly opened and scanned the letter.
"Dear Piddly," It read.
"Alteren and I have decided to join forces to fight the evils of injustice, impurity, and Steve. We have created a petition called, 'lets make Gnomes illegal', and we were hoping you would sign it. We hate all of you stupid effing little Gnomes and everyone involved with your kind, and as such we are severing our ties with you before it becomes illegal to write letters to you."
There was a doodle on the corner of the napkin of a stick-figure dwarf holding a gnome head with red X's for eyes on a spear.
"Since you're now our arch-nemesis, Piddly, we can't tell you where we are right now."
Piddly looked at the back side of the envelope, and in the upper left corner it said, 'Grablen and Alteren, Super-secret tent number 233, Light's Hope Chapel, Eastern Plaguelands.' Piddly sighed softly.
"Goodbye you dumb little gnome. We hope you die soon!"
"From Grablen the Great and Alteren the Mooncalf."
And at the bottom of the napkin it had been signed.
Grablen
and
Alteren
"Those fools!" Piddly thought, crumpling the letter into a ball and then setting it on fire with a flick of his wrist.
"They'll learn to regret the day they crossed Piddly, the Wise and Altogether Powerful Mage of Andromath!"
He climbed onto a nearby barstool, which gathered the collective attention of everyone at the bar.
"Grablen and Alteren!" Piddly cried, raising a fist into the air, "You both shall regret the day you crossed me!
Me! Piddly, the Wise and Altogether Powerful--"
"Wasn't Andromath one of those high mages from Dalaran?" A bar patron asked Piddly. Everyone turned to him for a moment, then looked quizzically back at Piddly. Losing himself for a moment, Piddly swallowed hard and lowered his fist for a moment.
"Urm, I...trained...under Andromath...?" He said quietly.
The man who had asked the question stood up from his barstool and said, "But how does that make you 'of' Andromath? Wouldn't it make you 'under the order of' Andromath?" Everyone once again looked at the man, then back at Piddly.
He swallowed hard again, and began to feel hot.
"I uh...urm." Piddly muttered. A different bar patron stood up this time, raising their voice more than they should have. "Gnomes live short lives, right? They are old and grey by the time they're thirty-seven. How is it that Andromath died seventeen years ago, and you're only in your tweens? It's impossible that you trained under Andromath!" At this, everyone at the bar began asking their own questions at once, not wanting to wait for Piddly's answer.
"So are you going to press charges?" Piddly asked Farley the innkeeper.
"Not if you help me clean this up," Farley said, pulling a broom from a closet.
"I've never started a bar-fight before, I swear." Piddly said, taking the broom from the innkeeper.
"Sure."
So they began sweeping up the broken glass, bits of chair and table and Smiling Jim from the floor.
"So how did you wind up in Goldshire?" Innkeeper Farley asked, dragging Jim outside.
Piddly took a swig of dwarven stout from a skin on a table. "That's a long story." Piddly said.
"It looks like we're gonna be here a while, my gnomish friend." Farley said, gesturing to the fire damage they still had to repair.
"Sorry about the fire damage, Derrick." Piddly said, kicking a passing spider. "I really didn't know that people caught fire as easily as that." Piddly scorched the spider into a quivering black mass with a single finger movement.
"It's all right." Farley said.
"Well," Piddly started. "I was born to a large family of Gnomes in Dun Morogh. I was born alongside my brother Tommy and my sister Vickland. Gnomes are born in litters, you see." Farley nodded.
Piddly continued, "Well, my parents figured that since I was the runt of the litter, they would name me after a brand of soup that was popular at the time. 'Essence of Squeezed Piddweed'. Vile stuff, by the way." Piddly added.
"But unfortunately, when I was three months old, they couldn't afford to feed me anymore, so they did what was popular at the time."
"They put you up for adoption?" Farley asked.
"No. They took me out to the frozen lake and threw me to the wolves that live on the island there." Piddly picked up a tooth and thoughtfully popped it into his mouth. After a few seconds he spit it out into his hand.
"Not mine." He said.
"You were thrown to the wolves?" Mr. Farley said, squinting his eyes at a sliver of ear that was lying on the ground, then looking up at Piddly.
"How did you escape them?"
"Escape them? Why would I want to escape them?" Piddly cried, astonished at Derrick's foolishness. He continued again, "Those wolves decided that instead of eating me, they would raise me as their own wolf cub. I can still speak fluent wolf to this day. After I got taller than my dad wolf, he sent me to Ironforge to train as a mage."
"They sent you away? So you could never go back to your wolf family?" Derrick asked, picking up a charred piece of thumb and throwing it into the fire.
"Well, they said that I could come back, but only on Thanksgiving and Chrismas, and if I came then I would have to bring cake."
"Sounds fair." Farley said.
"So I went up the hill to Ironforge, and once I finally found the mage training center, I met with a bright young Gnome named Ittie. She came from a small family of gnomes, and wasn't used to seeing very many people in one place, so I made friends with her. We went all the way through the mage academy before she decided that she wanted to be a warlock all along." Piddly sighed sadly.
"What a waste of time and talent." Farley said, shaking his head.
"Indeed. So after graduation, I was sent down to Westfall for my rite of passage into magehood."
"Oh, Westfall has some of the best pie bakers in the world," Farley said, throwing the dead spider into the fire to join the thumb. "Very good liver pie."
"...They wanted me to kill a man named Edwin." Piddly continued, undeterred by Derrick's constant interruption.
"Edwin Vancleef?" Farley said, leaning against a mop.
"Damn it, man! Stop asking questions!" Piddly threw a piece of bacon at Farley, which hit him in the eye.
"Yes. It was the very same. It turns out that he was hidden deep within a secret hideout. A cave, actually.
"That's where I met what were my two best friends until today before the bar-fight. A pasty human named Alteren and a dwarf with a drinking problem named Grablen. They had been lost in the cave for days without anything to eat or drink. Once they realized I had been trained as a mage, they flocked to me like zhevra to a water hole."
Farley rubbed his eye and glared at Piddly.
"So after we poked through the cave mindlessly for a few hours, we stumbled across a large cove hidden deep underground with a ship that was loading supplies and crew. On board was Edwin Vancleef."
"Once we killed him, everything was all guns and roses. Those were good days back then. And now they've turned their backs on me..."
"Good story, Piddly." Someone said. Piddly and Derrick whirled around to see Alteren and Grablen standing in the doorway.
"What are you guys doing here?" Piddly exclaimed.
"We're getting people to sign our 'lets make gnomes illegal' petition. We've gotten over three-hundred names already!" Grablen said, taking a deep drink from his hipflask.
"I'll sign it." Farley said.
Piddly sighed again.