Quintric

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Information

  • Player: Sol
  • Character full name: Doctor Quintric Jacque Arcois de Vrencog Rotorwrist, D.Eng, D.NPhil, Esq.
  • Character in-game name: Quintric.
  • Nickname(s): Quint, Quinny, Ric, “Doctor Rotorwrist, please and thank you.”
  • Association(s): The Alliance, the House of the Arcane Contraption, Explorer's League
  • Age: 143
  • Sex: Male
  • Hair: Black with natural bluish highlights, slowly greying, impeccably groomed and styled with a thick beard and a waxed moustache
  • Eyes: Lavender
  • Weight: 49lbs
  • Height: 2'10”

Appearance

A short, pudgy gnome with a rounded midsection and the dexterous fingers of an expert artificer. He wears a vambrace on his left arm that appears to house a multitude of mechanisms, notably a set of tiny mechanical arms motivated by unseen forces. His left arm itself, below the elbow, is missing, replaced by a clockwork prosthetic of brass and mithril. It seems that this 'vambrace' is actually part of it. His right leg below the knee tells a similar tale, and he continues to habitually use a cane.

He loathes to wear robes, favouring long, flaring coats that he keeps buttoned and laced up above the waist and open below, typically black and blue with silver finery. As far as headgear goes, he'll either opt for a tall, broad-brimmed hat and a pair of pince-nez spectacles or a set of dimly glowing goggles with an abundance of lenses. Typically with a cloak thrown over his shoulders atop the coat, he keeps a utility belt and all it entails strapped around his waist. When expecting trouble, he wears a truesilver breastplate under his coat, as well as a heavy, elaborate mantle and a pair of articulated gauntlets, all studded with mana gems and housing machinery of their own.

He tends to look at the world like it's an experiment that he painstakingly set up, only for it to fail to provide adequate results.

Personality

You could easily say that Quintric takes the stereotypical insatiable gnomish curiousity to a twisted, logical extreme. Arrogant to the point of narcissism and with an intellect to at least halfway back it up, he teems with knowledge - and yet, he's constantly after more of it. Be it monetarily, intellectually, magically or anything else, Quintric is on a determined, unending quest to enrich himself by any means necessary, until he dies of old age with his hunger unsated or is killed in the process. His impeccable manners, extensive vocabulary and refined habits are but a veil for his distaste for people in general. While he can often be ruthless, he prides himself on 'gentlemanly' conduct and abiding by the laws of the land, believing proper conduct is what separates his rampant scholarly habits from that of cultists huddling in a crypt. This doesn't stop him from being crass and cruel away from prying eyes, though.

His mild misanthropy and burning desire for self-betterment are linked in that people simply cannot make him happy like intellectual pursuits and material gain can. He'd scoff at this, of course; he scoffs at everything, but still. While his manners and friendly demeanour allow him to be subtle and manipulative, he's still a crass, impatient and spiteful creature, with a truly infernal temper when he doesn't get his own way. Above all other things, Quintric is a man of science, and he regards himself as a visionary for a grand future of Azeroth in which, through the majestic symbiosis of magic and technology, the weaknesses of both are eliminated. He often speaks of the coming of a new Age - not a Golden Age or a Silver Age, but rather a Truesilver Age, named after a magical metal that can be worked in mundane forges. And who would be ushering in this brave new world but the good Doctor himself?

History

Born into a family of Gnomish "old money" (i.e. former Gnomeregan nobility who had survived the revolution that deposed its monarchy four hundred years ago and set up the office of High Tinker in its stead, and with much of their wealth intact) and with the artifact title of Esquire to boot, young Quintric de Vrencog grew up surrounded by luxury and splendour. Strange, it was thought, how he insisted on secluding himself in his room and made do with only the most ascetic meals whenever possible. Even for a gnome, Quintric was unusually cerebral and internal gnome, to the point where, in the highly communal and 'open-doored' society of Gnomeregan, it warranted a certain stigma. This meant that becoming a reclusive academic in his adult life was only natural for Quintric. In order to earn his name, he designed and created a special vambrace with a series of rotors, gears and small manipulator arms attached that he dubbed the Rotorwrist General Utility Module, an expensive, general-purpose alternative to the military-made Gnomish Army Knife.

The module was something his industrialist father swiftly began to mass-produce and sell to a receptive market, and it cemented Quintric's role in the family business as a technical consultant, which he did part-time in the midst of his studies. Having spent easily the first fifty years of his adult life in academia, it's no surprise that he was able to cover a lot of ground in terms of knowledge. By the time he left the Royal Academy of the Sciences, he had a first-class Doctorate of Natural Philosophy (D.NPhil). Twenty years later, he departed the Whirlcrank Technical College with a Doctorate of Engineering (D.Eng), complete with full honours. Through his mixed studies, Quintric saw the intersection between technology and the natural world - particularly, how machines could influence the latter. And so he became obsessed with the fields of physics, chemistry and alchemy, struggling to come up with new ways to incorporate them into his machines.

His theoretical studies, however, were bad for business, and the Rotorwrist module was condemned to obscurity by bigger, better designs on the market. Vrencog Utilities, Ltd.'s finances were struggling, and so his father gave him an ultimatum - put your studies to one side and help out the family, or be disowned. Quintric always hated the bastard anyway. He felt no guilt in stealing a large sum of gold from his coffers and fleeing to Dalaran, taking up a whimsical desire to learn magic he regularly entertained as suddenly part of his life plan. Magic, he reasoned, was but another means of understanding and manipulating the world around him - and so studying it and learning its use was only a logical progression in his quest to know and to master the world around him. He spent many years in Dalaran, learning the ways of magic. Knowledge of the arcane supplemented his scientific expertise well, and presented him with a new field in which to theorise and study into. After several years of study, he settled into a small cottage on the outskirts of the magocratic city, resuming his research as he had back in Gnomeregan after becoming a scholar of some small repute. However, he also began accompanying students on expeditions as often as he could, ever eager to broaden his knowledge in new and different ways. It was from this that his interest in history and archeology grew.

All this changed when Dalaran entered the Second War, and Quintric, eager to see a species and culture from another world himself, volunteered swiftly to serve. Hindsight is, as they say, a b***h, and this proved to be a bad idea. Relegated to a logistics position, an argument that arose between him and his colleague while they prepared a portal to transport goods led to them both being deposited in the middle of a nearby town being sacked by the Horde. His friend was butchered and Quintric barely escaped with his life, losing his arm and leg in the process and being forced to cauterise the stumps in order to survive. But when he returned to Dalaran, he was not welcomed, but berated and discharged. Reputation in Dalaran ruined, he made his way back to Gnomeregan. His father's business had bankrupted decades ago, and the proud de Vrencog line was impoverished. Quintric's scholarly habits had always been built over the strong support of money to fall back on; money he now lacked. And thus, he invested in whatever he could in the aftermath of the war and found himself steadily lifted back into a comfortable financial state during the post-war economic boom as Gnomeregan's military industry was repurposed for more civilian needs. With that done, Quintric resumed his studies in quiet seclusion.

And slowly but surely, the pieces started falling into place. For all the artistic flare it was taught with in Dalaran, arcane magic was simply another science - and it was another science Quintric could incorporate into his machines. Word of his studies spread and soon, Quintric was invited to take up a place in the formative House of the Arcane Contraption. Losing his arm and leg had been a substantial dent to his practical studies and self-esteem, and he's eternally grateful towards the House for helping him construct prosthetics for both. Dalaran's fall a few years later taught him nothing if not that magic alone was a dangerous path that invited the presence of demons. Harnessed through the medium of technology, it was less corruptive, less addictive and carried less risk of demonic intervention. Stripped of its mystique and approached with scientific rigour, he experienced an epiphany in which he saw magic, employed through these means, as a path to a better and brighter future for Azeroth, immune to the folly of the high elves' mysterious progenitors and Dalaran itself.

Quintric was out at an Explorer's League digsite, examining a Titanic artefact for them as an independent contractor when Gnomeregan came under siege from creatures from beneath the earth. Around the same time, similar beasts erupted in various quarries and digsites throughout Khaz Modan, including the one Quintric was studying at. The small expedition was forced to withdraw back to Ironforge and Quintric, though thankfully spared from the horrors within the techno-city, was unable to do anything as his home, his wealth and his resources of knowledge were all destroyed. Slowly, the refugees started filing in, and Quintric took up residence with them in the recently constructed Tinker Town district.

These days, Quintric is nowhere near as rich as he would like to project, nor is he as knowledgeable or powerful as his exuberant, boastful and self-assured nature seems to suggest. He uses his magical and practical scientific knowledge as crutches to keep himself going, relying primarily on conjured nutrition to survive and using the various applications of his skills to secure rudimentary income wherever his travels take him.

Skills and abilities

In his capacity as a man of science, Quintric is an expert in the fields of physics and metallurgy and is passably versed in alchemy and other kinds of chemistry. This pales, however, to his expertise in artifice and mechanism, and he uses his scientific background to synthesise materials for his machines while the machines themselves often harness electromagnetic forces to achieve drastic effects - and that's also where his arcanic skills come in. His fine-tuned talents in the school of Transmutation means he can manipulate and alter the mass and density of objects around him for short intervals, teleport and even affect the flow of time in localised areas. His other field of specialty, Enchantment, allows him to imbue remarkable effects on otherwise mundane items.

All this orbits around what he calls his 'arcano-artifice," or what you'd call magitech. A small enchantment akin to animating a broom to sweep of its own accord, Quintric has realised, can set an entire clockwork mechanism eternally turning, or something designed to leave an object resilient to certain types of damage can allow a machine that ought to otherwise destroy itself to function. He can transmute components to make them harder or softer, heavier or lighter, utilise mana gems and the crystallised remnants of disenchanted magical items as power sources, and perhaps most importantly of all, he can use machines as vehicles for spells. Notably, his eponymous Rotorwrist has been enchanted for ease of casting a select few spells, including polymorphing his foes, forging mana-shields and summoning blasts of electrical power. The Rotorwrist Module itself can quickly conduct repairs on mechanical devices and, if he's ever forced into close-quarters combat, flash-freeze a blade of ice that protrudes from the vambrace to be used for self-defence. His goggles allow him to 'see' ley lines and visually perceive sources of magical energy.

However, his magical expertise don't go far beyond the fields of Transmutation and Enchantment (with limited knowledge of Evocation and Conjuration), and he's disadvantaged in battles against full-on mages. Moreover, his focus on those two fields has left him dealing with a degree of arcane corruption - it has worsened the antisocial elements of his personality, left him with a compulsive desire to enchant all of his belongings and, worse of all - he's been known to teleport involuntarily. Underneath his coat and breastplate, though, he wears a device of his own design called the Spatial-Temporal Anchorage Harness which, so long as its clockwork mechanisms are kept going, prevents this from happening. Understandably, though, this makes it difficult for him to sleep.