User:Joshmaul/Wilbert Blunderwitz

"'I mosey. Occasionally I galavant or skedaddle. Hustle, when need be. In short bursts, though. Short legs.'"
 * - Dr. Wilbert Blunderwitz, explaining how he's rarely seen in the cities

Dr. Wilbert Blunderwitz, High Mechpriest of Gnomeregan, was among the first of his people to take up the Light in the wake of the Cataclysm. Though he still considers Gnomeregan to be home and hopes for its total reclamation one day, he prefers to venture out onto the road, providing his healing services to whomever might need them.

Biography
Wilbert Blunderwitz was an alchemist and physician in the decades prior to the fall of Gnomeregan, possessing a talent for the healing arts that came naturally to him; he earned his doctorate in medicine and alchemy from Gearshaft University, graduating in the same class as Professor Rakeri Sputterspark, an up-and-coming mage and engineer (later warlock). He married another of his classmates, Nella Cogmixer, and they had a son, Englebert, just prior to the First War. Following Sicco Thermaplugg's attempted coup that left Gnomeregan more or less in ruins, he helped carry the wounded out of the irradiated city and got them safely to Ironforge, where the gnomes set up a court-in-exile in Tinker Town. He remained on the homefront, mostly tending to refugees from Gnomeregan, until the war against the Lich King. Despite his increasing years, Wilbert volunteered as a field medic attached to the Fizzcrank Airstrip in the Borean Tundra, narrowly avoiding being "decursed" by Gearmaster Mechazod when he was recovered from the pipes of the nearby oil refinery. It was at that moment that Wilbert experienced an epiphany - that perhaps he had been spared that ghastly fate for some other purpose. With the airstrip secure, Wilbert offered his services to the Argent Crusade at its camps in Zul'Drak and in Icecrown itself, where he began to wonder if perhaps the Light was working within him.

After the fall of the Lich King, Wilbert returned home to Dun Morogh, where High Tinker Mekkatorque had assembled an army of both gnomes and their Alliance comrades for Operation: Gnomeregan, the long-awaited retaking of their capital from Thermaplugg and his leper gnomes. During the fighting, Englebert - an officer in the Gnomeregan militia - was trapped in the lower halls of the city when Thermaplugg set off his Irradiator 5000, and Wilbert feared his son to be lost. Luckily, Englebert was found by the Survivor Assistance Facilitation Expedition, or S.A.F.E., and cleansed of his irradiation before being sent back out to the surface, where Mekkatorque had established New Tinkertown at the city gates. Just as in Northrend, Wilbert believed it to be a sign, and after his work with the Argent Crusade, was convinced that it was the doing of the Light. He found himself drawn to others who had been granted the Light's boon, and thus became among the first gnomish priests. He would expand his knowledge of the Light and its healing arts throughout the conflicts of the Cataclysm and in Pandaria. Unlike most other gnomes, who saw the Light simply as another source of power, Wilbert took guidance from bishops in Stormwind (those not revealed to be agents of the Twilight's Hammer) and embraced the precepts of the Church of the Holy Light wholeheartedly, working to uphold the Three Virtues of respect, tenacity, and compassion.

During the war against the Burning Legion, Wilbert was inducted into the Conclave of Netherlight, the combined force of Azeroth's priests. He would be paired with his son Englebert, who had become a member of the Unseen Path, the pre-eminent order of hunters, during the conflict that followed throughout the Broken Isles and eventually on Argus. Though Englebert had not embraced the faith, Wilbert was convinced that his son also did the Light's work in his own way.