Dakx

Information

Player: Geoni

Character Full Name: Dakx Goldhammer

Character In-Game Name: Dakx

Association(s): Kezan (ex), Bilgewater Cartel (ex), Goblin Ports (especially Ratchet), Dalaran, The Love Exchange

Race: Goblin

Class: Cook/Healer

Age: 71

Sex: Male

Hair: Although he is balding significantly, he still has a good crown of bright white hair on his head, along with similarly colored facial hair that is thick at the sides and thins out as it nears the chin.

Eyes: Red.

Weight: 69 lbs.

Height: 3’6” (.98)

Appearance

Usual Garments/Armor: Dakx prefers to wear a lot of black and red. His boots and overalls, leather in material, are black in color. However, underneath the thin straps of the overalls is a thick shirt with a dark red hue.

Other: More often than not, Dakx is pulling around a cart that is slightly taller and wider than his own body. It is five feet tall and three by three in perimeter. The cart has been strategically designed to hold as many items as it can, and much of its storage compartments fold out once it is opened. Within the cart are a large number of ingredients, rudimentary cooking utensils, a sleeping bag and toiletries for Dakx, clothing, and medical supplies. It has two long wooden extensions for holding, and two wheels.

He also has a thin necklace of iron around his neck, and the pendant that hangs at the bottom of it is a tiny ruby. If one were to inspect the shape of this small gem, they would be able to deduce that it was once the centerpiece of a ring.

Personality

Dakx, first and foremost, lives for the well-being of his children. Even if he makes a decent amount of coin as a travelling cook and healer, he sends most of it to his children in the Echo Isles and lives a poor standard of living himself. After many years as a father, the only thing he finds wealth in is his children, and so if he were to be greedy in any way, it would be for their benefit. Having been treated so unfairly in his early life, he prefers to be fair in his transactions even if it means he might not be getting as much money out of a transaction if he wasn’t being fair. Another trait that stems from being a father is his will to nurture others. If an injured or ill person stays at his inn, he will go out of his way to make sure that they get better, even if they may not be staying for long.

Aside from this, he likes to use his job as a way to learn about the world that he lives in. Since he’s often in Goblin ports, he spends a lot of his time in the centers of Azeroth’s trade, encountering people of all walks of life. He’ll often stop carrying his cart around for a moment and converse with them if they’re alone or if he senses that they’re welcoming enough. Having come to understand more about the world, he’s also become good about understanding both sides of an argument. Because of this, if a people break out into a fight, he’ll go so far as getting hurt in order to prevent guard intervention. He does, however, like to see people duke it out through words and will push people to do this rather than get into a brawl. This is one of the peculiarities that he developed due to the many disputes he had to deal with as an innkeeper.

As a man at the age of 71, Dakx has developed a high level of conscientiousness due to the need of remaining healthy enough to travel for long periods of time on foot, often pulling a cart behind himself. Before every meal he washes his hands with water, and after every meal he uses his old toothbrush and paste to clean his teeth. When he comes to a resting point and is done pulling his cart around, he pushes himself to perform at least a half hour worth of stretching exercises. These, along with many other rituals, dictate Dakx’s lifestyle. However, this conscientiousness isn’t limited to himself alone; he often pesters the people he is close to to take care of themselves as well as he takes care of himself.

Ever since half of is family died on Kezan, Dakx has become increasingly overbearing on those in his family and this also applies to close friends. Not only is he nosy because of this, but he actively tries to take part in their lives all the time even if they don't want him to. This lands him in a variety of places: slums, the battlefield, and even places in Outland.

History

Born as an accident, into a family that couldn’t afford to raise another child, Dakx was sent to an orphanage. He spent most of his early childhood years there, and since he wasn’t as tall or physically fit as the other boys and girls he shared the orphanage with he was bullied into doing the most undesirable of chores along with having the largest workload of the children. As the years went by, he continued to be the chore mule; however, there was a girl a little younger than himself who ended up sharing the same fate. Her name was Zess, and only Zess, because she decided that she would never use her last name again after being abandoned. When the two realized that they were both being bullied into carrying through the bulk of the orphanage’s chores, they would help each other out when they became tired. For years, Zess would be Dakx’s only friend. By the time he was seventeen years old, his friendship blossomed into a deeper affection.

Unfortunately for him, a man came in to observe the orphanage. This man was infamous for adopting children from the orphanage whenever he had enough income to feed another mouth. His purpose for adopting a child was to have another free worker for his mining business. Dakx had heard enough to know that it would be either Zess or himself that would be adopted, and that being adopted by this man would mean that he or Zess would be forced into a level of labor worse than they currently lived, so he put forth the effort to look like he was the hardest worker amongst the children in order to prevent the man from adopting Zess. His endeavor was a success, and the man adopted Dakx. And yet, he wasn’t even given the time to say goodbye to his only friend.

For the next five years, Dakx was thrown into a life of intensive labor in the man’s mines. The only thing that prevented him from falling into an exhaustive depression was the knowledge that there were others that worked with him who shared this undesirable way of life and the bond that he shared with them. Due to the fact that they had little to no wealth to their name, these miners didn’t succumb to the greed and selfishness often seen in their superiors. They looked out for one another, because their friends were all that they had. With the brotherhood that his coworkers gave him, he was able to find the strength to survive until adulthood, when he could be freed from his adoptive chains and find a new job in his adulthood.

In his search for a new job, Dakx was able to locate Zess, who was now working as a barmaid in one of the taverns of Kezan. The only job offering in this tavern was that of a janitor. He found many other open jobs that would have given him a better working life, such as a gem cutter or a factory supervisor, but because of the affection he still felt towards his childhood friend, he became a janitor. The affection that Dakx and Zess held for one another eventually became a deep love, and they soon declared themselves mates. With the money they were able to come up with, they got a little place of their own and had a few children.

However, they had no idea how expensive it would be to raise all the children they produced over the years. Dakx was promoted to a barkeep, but even that didn’t bring in enough money. They had to sell clothing, furniture, and anything else of value that they could get their hands on. Zess even melted the gold of her wedding band and sold it for some coin. The family had little to their name, having to share everything: the same bed, toys, a bathroom that barely worked. Despite this, Dakx and Zess were at peace with their lives and considered themselves lucky that they were able to produce and raise four healthy children, particularly the last one since he was a birth that occurred when Zess was in her early fifties. They had also become grandparents after their daughter Wizelle had a child she named Jarexous, although Dakx vehemently detested the boy's father due to his personality and personal ambitions that led the new grandfather to believe that he would have to be the father figure in this boy's life. Despite their rocky passage into grandparenthood, Zess and Dakx felt wealthy. However, they also felt poverty. For this reason, Dakx had to take on a second job as a doctor’s assistant. Although it was laborious and he could barely handle the stress, the job was very satisfying for Dakx and he found that he had a knack for patching up damaged people.

The home that they spent so much of their lives supporting was located at the base of Mount Kajaro. They admired the beauty of the volcano and the forestry that surrounded it. They would live in their scenic location for decades, and enjoyed every minute of their busy lives. However, when the volcano was beginning to erupt, it put all of their lives in danger. A feeling they shared with the rest of the people of Kezan, their admiration of the mountain turned to fear. Their only means of escape was a single ship that was docked at the harbor, and the tickets were unreasonably expensive. The family was only able to scrabble together enough for three tickets. Being a family of seven, the grandparents had no choice but to decide which children would get those tickets to safety. It was something that they couldn’t bring themselves to decide on. It was a situation of having to choose who would live and who would die, one that Dakx has yet to recover from.

Initially their three oldest children, who were well into their adulthood and old enough to understand the implications of the situation, wanted to stay on the island because they've lived the longest out of all the children and their younger sibling and nephew deserved to survive. However, one of these three was Wizelle, who was a mother, and she didn't want her son to go without a mother since he and his father Maxto already had a bad relationship. So the two older children decided that they would stay with the parent who wanted to remain on the island. Dakx and Zess both wanted the other to go on that ship and bring the rest of their children to a safer place, so they argued over it intensely. Dakx was unable to win this argument, and so against his own wishes he would be the one to evacuate with his daughter, son, and grandson. Although the two younger children were old enough to understand what was going on, they were younger and weren’t as eager to sacrifice themselves as their older siblings were. Another problem arose when they could only afford three tickets, and there were three children. Thankfully, Dakx's grandson was always short for his age and was just small enough to be smuggled in through his father’s heaping ‘bag of clothing’. The danger presented by the volcano was imminent and close, so they didn’t even have the time to say goodbye. Zess snuck the only remaining part of her wedding band, a small ruby, into that bag of clothing. It was her way of saying goodbye. She, along with the rest of the children, would die in the destruction of Kezan.

Even if they were able to escape Kezan on the ship, the rest of the family would have to endure a number of dangers. They had to endure the shipwreck that happened when the ship was attacked, the slavery they were pushed into, and escaping this slavery when they got the chance. Although he and his family were thankful for the work of Thrall and the Horde when it came to freeing them from the dangers they were confronted with, they would remain neutral rather than working for the cartel that was run by a man who exploited every situation that the Goblins of Kezan were put in, so Dakx and his children escaped to a village on the Echo Isles and lived there for a while. This was a small village where everyone took care of one another by sharing the work and it was easy to survive. Dakx’s oldest daughter realized that she would be able to take care of her kid and her kid brother so that her father could find work in a bigger city, although her inner struggle with alcoholism might have suggested otherwise. Both the son and the grandson had already reached the age where they can find work, but due to their behavior that wasn't always stable for them, particularly Dakx's youngest son. Additionally, Jarexous was always in and out of the area. She was unable to convince Dakx to leave her and go through with her plan until she explained that if he worked in a larger city, the value of gold would be worth less than it would in the village, so he should get a job there and send money to the village. Dakx agreed to this, and found work as an innkeeper in Ratchet.

Becoming an innkeeper was easier than he thought it would be. The former owner of the inn was all too happy to drop the weight of handling it on this newcomer’s shoulders. It wasn’t until later when Dakx realized why that was: the inn was haunted. It was a tavern that went by the name of ‘The Toothless Prophet’, in honor of the ghost that haunted the inn. The stories proved all too real for Dakx and he often encountered this spirit, who would make a mess of the tavern right after he cleaned it up and sometimes attempt to physically harm customers. This led to the inn becoming less and less popular until Dakx had to give up owning it. He decided to sell the place to another Goblin who was planning on using the building to turn it into a weapons shop. Dakx warned him that a weapons shop is the last thing the guy wanted to turn the building into due to the ghost, and then moved on.

Once again, Dakx was unemployed. For somebody with a list of jobs he’s had in his life, this was something that needed to change quickly. For a few weeks, he returned to the Echo Isles to visit his family, and told them of his troubles. In response, his daughter told him that he should look for a career in cooking, since he was an experienced chef and a lot of people often complemented his cooking when he made food in the tavern. The problem was that he didn’t have enough money to get a business license in one of the cities and set up a restaurant or shop. Clever, his daughter provided a solution: travel with it.

It took a whole lot of convincing, and in order to do so, his children built him a little cart that he could pull around and sell stuff from, and they all chipped in with what little they had to buy him a small and compact oil-run oven/stove that could barely fit into the cart. The boys designed and carved the wood of the cart themselves while Wizelle made additional purchases: cooking materials, a first aid kit, and a tiny little sleeping bag. When the cart was complete, Dakx raved and told his children that it was the most precious gift he had ever received, following them. What he didn’t know, however, was what was in store for him.

He began to journey around with the cart and realized that not only was it difficult to carry at his age and considering how much the thing weighed, but it didn’t bring him in as much coin as running the inn did and it made long distance travel difficult, restricted to ships. His cooking was well received, despite the restrictions of only having a few supplies and things to cook with. However, another surprise came when an injured human crawled up to his cart when he was near Ratchet. Not caring how he received the injuries, Dakx attended to him until his injuries were taken care of enough for travel.

When they arrived to Ratchet, he met up with the man’s sister, who was a priestess. She thanked him more than once, but asked him why he would heal a random human. When Dakx told her about his current situation, that he has had medical training from a doctor, and that he will take care of a person no matter what faction or place they come from, she knew what she would do to thank him. She may not be able to convert a Goblin to the religion that she followed, but she could sense the benevolence in him, and his potential. So, for a month, she stayed in a city she detested in order to teach the man the fundamentals of utilizing light magic. He was tested, and to his own surprise he found himself capable of wielding the forces of the light. Once he proved himself, they parted ways and he traveled out of Ratchet with an additional purpose: not only can he serve others through making a meal, but he could heal them as well, with the right amount of training. And it is this training that Dakx must work hard on obtaining while carrying the burden of a business and a distant family on his shoulders.