Fizzwick Tanglebram was born on the road from Whistledown, delivered in the back of a wagon somewhere on the dusty path under 5 miles to a coast that would eventually become Sandpoint. His father Corvin had spent the better part of two decades as the only gnome in Whistledown who fished — not as a curiosity, not as an experiment, but as a vocation, a calling, a deeply held conviction that the best possible way to spend a life was on the water pulling things out of it. This was not a viewpoint the gnome community of Whistledown shared. Gnomes, as a people, regard water the way a sensible person regards a house fire — fascinating from a distance, worth studying, absolutely not somewhere you live. Corvin’s neighbors had tried confusion, then argument, then social pressure, and finally a kind of exhausted collective resignation before the Tanglebrams packed a wagon, loaded it with fishing gear, and pointed it toward the Lost Coast. They arrived in Sandpoint’s first year, one of the town’s earliest settler families, and Corvin staked his claim on Gull Street with the quiet satisfaction of a gnome who had found his people — none of whom were gnomes.
Thirty-six years on, Corvin Tanglebram is regarded by Sandpoint’s fishing community as a genuine original — a three-foot gnome who knows the tides of Varisian Bay better than men twice his age, whose boat the Stellar Sturgeon is a harbor landmark, and whose stubbornness in the face of all reasonable objection has earned him a kind of gruff respect among the dockworkers and fishermen of Gull Street. His son Fitz is a different matter entirely — though no less familiar to the town. Fitz grew up everywhere at once: underfoot at the docks, front row at the theater, haunting the Curious Goblin, performing stories for neighborhood children near the Sunday market. Most of Sandpoint has watched him grow from a toddler peering over dock pilings to a young gnome with wild copper hair, a teal shirt, and a brown leather vest with an implausible number of pockets — still technically a child by gnome reckoning, though nobody in town thinks of him that way anymore. He is the gnome who shows you the jar with the unidentified creature in it. He is the one who wants to know where you came from and what the strangest thing you ever saw was and whether you have time to start from the beginning. He is, in the estimation of most of Sandpoint, completely harmless — which is exactly what he would want them to think. His dream is to see the world as soon as he can break the fishing line of his father’s.