A/N: So I've had this idea floating around my head for a while now. I've never written a crossover before! It should be... something. Right? Heh.

This is either going to be incredibly entertaining or horrendously awful. Maybe both? Oh well! Let me get the customary "I own nothing" out of the way.

Bioware owns Dragon Age, and Blizzard owns Warcraft. I own... myself. That... didn't come out right. All the WoW characters are made up off the top of my head, so if it sounds like your character, it's NOT. It's just an evil twin. Or a good twin. Or a distant third cousin twice removed. Or something.

Yes.

He had forgotten how bright Stormwind was.

Giro blinked and rubbed his eye, squinting. When you spend two solid months in the dark recesses of Ironforge, lit only by the occasional brazier and sparks from metal grinding together, suddenly being thrust under the open sky is alarming.

He feels like a kobold. One of those kobolds who stay in caves for their entire lives just waiting for some wayward adventurer to come in and slaughter them all. And take their candle.

Minus the slaughtering part.

Giro was good at not getting himself slaughtered. He sighed and resigned himself to yet another eventful day of playing Don't-Get-Stepped-On as he glued himself to the side of the road, peering uneasily at all the humans and night elves and whatnot that were walking around, tall and seemingly unable to look at their own feet when they walk.

Put him on the battlefield or pit him against a dragon, and he's a tiny ball of demonic, agonizing death and destruction. But drop him on the streets of Stormwind's Trade District and he struggles just to not end up underfoot.

He toyed with the idea of just calling his dreadsteed and trampling all these idiots, but after his incident with an irate priest who didn't appreciate getting a face-full of demon horse, he chose to walk.

Priests were scary when upset.

His stay in Ironforge had been a pleasant throwback to before his adventuring days, back when excitement consisted of getting a new machine to not blow up in his face rather than not getting chewed on by a dragon.

Dragons really didn't like him. They tended to ignore the shiny glory-hounds wearing full plate screaming in their faces and came right at him.

He'd gotten really good at split-second soulstoning.

Giro had been a great engineer, once, back before he'd figured out that summoning demons out of thin air was monumentally more rewarding than building replicas of things other engineers had already figured out how to make. He hadn't tinkered in years, so his visit to Ironforge had turned out to be more bittersweet than relaxing.

His fingers had been itching to build something, and eventually he'd given up on restraint and locked himself in his room at the inn, churning out mechanical squirrels and a stack of bombs taller than his voidwalker. It had been incredibly frustrating to be so desperate to craft things. He wasn't even an engineer anymore. Not by trade.

No, he was an alchemist and a tailor, now. The guild had needed him to be, so he'd given up engineering in favor of more… arcane pursuits.

"Make one of the mages do those. They love being all… magic-y," he'd protested, only to be treated with that patented Guild-Master glare that had him fidgeting awkwardly until he agreed just to escape its soul-searing stare.

It was amazing, considering the Guild-Master wasn't that much taller than he was, but for a dwarf, the man could loom. He made the draenei seem like midgets when he was in full Righteous Indignation mode.

Giro sighed and fiddled idly with the hilt of his dagger as he walked. It was incredibly difficult to find gnome-sized magical staves. And cog knows he'd tried. Most, if not all, of the really good weapons dropped by enemies were sized for a human. He'd gone so far as to try using a wand as a staff once. It… hadn't worked out well.

So, he'd taken to using a dagger that could honestly pass for a longsword in his hands, since at least he wouldn't have to drag it along awkwardly behind him. At least being bullied into picking up tailoring meant he didn't have to rely on hand-me-downs from the dwarf priests or the gnome mages he knew. He could make his own robes, thank you very much.

A boot connected with his side and sent him skidding into the wall, and he glared at the snickering warrior going on his merry way. The kid couldn't have been more than a novice, at best, if his shabby armor was anything to go by. A single shadow bolt would be enough to put him on a first class flight to the graveyard, but…

Giro straightened his robe and fixed his collar, shaking his head sharply to the side with a steadying breath.

He's not worth the mana, Giro. Just keep walking. Be the bigger man.

He smirked at that and kept going. He had an appointment to keep. It was apparently a Big Deal, seeing as how Pnubris himself had asked him to come. It wasn't often the Guild-Master summoned him when a raid wasn't imminent, and he was hoping this meant he'd finally be promoted to officer, where he belonged. He'd been part of this guild since it'd been founded almost six years ago, but he was still stuck down with the damn recruits just because he'd made a passing comment on the attractiveness of the leader's wife.

It had been a joke!

Everyone knows dwarf women don't exist.

With a final, steadying breath, Giro hopped up the steps to the massive, newly renovated Bank of Stormwind, stopping to catch his breath at the top. Stairs. Such a human concept. In Ironforge, everything is nice and level, and where it's not, there are ramps.

He spotted Pnubris immediately. It was hard not to. The man radiated magnificence just by standing there, hands clasped behind him, Immolation armor glowing, drawing the envious eye of everyone who passed him just because.

Everyone who was anyone knew Pnubris.

Giro had never commanded attention like that. Well, there was that one time, back when the Nemesis armor was the most amazing thing ever, and he'd been the only warlock in all of Ironforge to have a full set. That had lasted a few days before Pnubris had shown up in all that amazingly glowy paladin armor and stolen the spotlight. Again.

But Giro didn't mind. It was difficult to be adequately mysterious when you're glowing like a damn Beacon of Light. And Pnubris needed to be attention-grabbing. That was his job.

Giro cleared his throat politely, fingers still twitching on the hilt of his dagger, pasting on a friendly smile for a man who had once been his friend, and was now his leader.

Pnubris turned, face masked by his helm, and Giro was immensely annoyed. You'd think the man would have the decency to at least talk to him face-to-face. It was incredibly unnerving talking to a glowing mask without any indication of what the man underneath it was thinking.

That was probably the point.

"You wanted to see me, sir?" Giro asked, voice dripping with false sincerity, eye twitching in that damned nervous tick he seemed to spontaneously contract whenever he was within ten feet of his illustrious Guild-Master. No one could put him on such a knife-edge of tension and anticipation like good 'ol Pnubris Lighthammer.

"There's a new recruit," he began without any sort of preamble, and Giro checked a sigh. "A mage. Human. He's a close personal friend of mine," Giro hated those words, "and he needs help with some of his spells."

Giro blinked. "With all due respect, sir, wouldn't it make more sense to ask another… er… mage to do that?"

"They've tried. And failed." Pnubris and his damn mask. Giro wished he could see what the man was thinking. "I need him ready for the Bastian in two days. If you can pull this off, I'll see to your promotion."

Was he bribing Giro with promises of promotion? Giro didn't bother to hide his scowl. The odds of him teaching a mage how to do anything other than get themselves killed were about as high as him learning how to use a shield.

But he wanted that promotion, and damn it Pnubris knew that. He would bet ten gold that the man was smirking beneath that stupid helmet of his.

With a curt nod Giro turned on his heels and stalked away, hands clenched, shadows and flame flickering around his fingers as he went.

Damn him.

Damn him to the Void.

The human was useless. Giro rubbed a hand over his face and tugged on his beard, barely resisting the urge to set the worthless mage on fire.

"Have you ever cast a portal spell before?" Giro asked, irritated. The human scoffed.

"Of course I have. I just… haven't done it in a while. That's all."

Sure. And Giro secretly loved wearing women's clothing.

He snickered a bit, thinking back to the good 'ol days of running Blackrock Spire, back when Pnubris was still a lowly mortal. Oh Nefarius and his taunting. That had been a day to remember.

"Fools!" Nefarius had spat, incensed. "Kill the one in the dress!"

Giro had, of course, been the only member of their group in anything resembling a dress. He'd stopped mid-cast, turned to Lord Victor Nefarius, and shaken his fist, scowling. "It's a ROBE!"

Pnubris had never let him live that down.

Shaken out of his musings by the unmistakable sound of a spell fizzing out, Giro threw up his hands in exasperation. How mages managed to get gear like his without knowing how to do so much as cast a simple portal spell, Giro would never know.

With a frown, he snatched the spellbook from the frustrated human, ignoring his protests, and skimmed it. Mage spellbooks were so unnecessarily complicated. Not like warlock grimoires, whose instructions varied from "Chant this in a creepy fashion," to "Wiggle your fingers like this."

No, this fascinating read said something along the lines of: "Dissolve the arcane fluctuation so that the upsurge in esoteric magics refabricates the Coil. Avoid coming in direct contact with the Twisting Nether AT ALL COSTS. You are a scholar of the Arcane, not a meddler of demons and Taint."

Well no wonder the boy couldn't make heads or tails of this.

Giro threw the book back at the mage's head—he hadn't bothered paying attention when the lad introduced himself—and stroked his bushy white beard.

"Just…" Giro sighed, irritated, "Just try again. I don't know. Imagine where you want to end up and just… cast it."

When in doubt, simplify.

The human sighed and focused, and Giro hid his smirk with his hand. The mage had the funniest Casting Face he'd ever seen. It looked like he was constipated.

He almost fell out of his chair when the portal shimmered into view, leaving the mage gasping for breath and sweating from the effort. Giro hopped down and approached, shuffling, peering into the portal. He didn't recognize the place on the other side. A Horde city, maybe? Wouldn't that just be perfect?

Giro almost made the mage test it, but Pnubris would have his head if he dropped the most inexperienced mage—a close personal friend—right on top of Orgrimmar or somewhere equally unpleasant.

"All right. Wait here while I see where this goes. If I end up somewhere useless like Shattrath, I am coming back and I will feed you to my felhunter."

With a final breath, he touched his fingers to the portal's surface and the world went white.