Royce

**Royce** is a Roserade nobody who wanders the plains surrounding Auril City and Pastorville. Suffering from a peculiar chronic cough, she stays on the move to ease her symptoms and subsists by gambling and hunting outlaws on occasion. In spite of her fragility, she is sometimes known for her quick draw and deadly aim with a Bullet Seed.

## History

Royce shares little about her past life, but she has disclosed to Arsinelle that she was raised on the plains by well-off parents who wanted her to study dentistry. At some point, she walked away from her education to become the star shooter of *Bouffalant Bill's Wild World*—a team of traveling showmen who performed wondrous feats associated with the fringes of civilization. Royce was steadily rising to fame until the show's wagon train made a wrong turn one day. The wagons were mired in unfamiliar terrain, leaving the performers stuck in the wilderness. Allegedly, a witch named Bábjága appeared that night and offered to lift the wagons in exchange for an unspecified valuable belonging to any of the showmen. They drew straws, and Royce took the shortest. The cruel witch lifted the wagons but also took Royce's natural poisons in payment. Without these defenses, she soon developed an unrelenting cough.

Shortly after this incident, Royce had a heated quarrel with Bouffalant Bill himself for undisclosed reasons. Her cough was affecting her performance, but she stubbornly downplayed the danger until one of her trick shots put a thorn in Bill's eye. Accused of growing bitter and deliberately damaging the showman's vision, she left the show and succumbed to habits of drink and chance. To this day, former *Wild World* performers like Billy the Kid hold her responsible for the group's falling out and deny there ever was an encounter with a witch.

## Personality

"*Well, what do you know? Either you're not as much a drunkard as you look, or this is just your kind of game.*"
— Royce after Cinder correctly answers how many flowers she is holding up
"*In times like these, for reasons strongly relating to one Billy the Kid, I am predisposed to invoke the great and ancient custom of the quiet game... Starting now.*"
— Royce after watching Ceasar feud with Winter
To the observer, Royce does not have a care in the world. She supposedly travels to mitigate her illness, but she consumes harmful substances and gambles her daily bread with such frequency that she may as well have a death wish—or at least an addiction. She retires each night in poor health and low spirits and returns for more of the same in the morning. She is stunningly nonchalant about her own well-being.

More than this, Royce is self-depreciative in conversation. Although she styles herself a sophisticate—ironically perhaps—and speaks in long words and obscure constructions, Royce considers herself on par with any other flavor of derelict. No matter how despicable the other, there is apparently no one she looks down on but herself. She advertises herself as untrustworthy and unkind, and she pushes away any who would make friends with her. Paradoxically, she is a hypocrite in her own words.

When she is not hating herself, Royce is crafty and shrewd. She assesses risks keenly and hedges her bets accordingly. She is a loner by nature, but she often has sound advice for those who win her favor. Rarely, she may even offer her impeccable aim to a decent cause.

Since partnering with Arsinelle, Royce has tempered her vices and regained much of her former vigor.