Royston Vasey Periwinkle

Royston Vasey Periwinkle

Full Name: Royston Vasey Periwinkle

Alias "Roy", "Perry", "Winks"

Physical Description

Gender: Male

Species: Human

Race: Lunatic

Hair Color and Style: Ginger. Moustache.

Eye Color: Blue

Skin Color: White

Biographical Information

Father: Hillary Periwinkle

Mother: Pauline Jones

Date of Birth: 1611

Place of Birth: Teldrin, Lunaris (now Ynnraile)

Date of Death: n/a

Place of Death: n/a

Current Residence(s): Shirekeep

Nationality at Birth: Shirerithian

Current Allegiance(s): Shireroth

Occupation: International Correspondent

Keltia Correspondent of the Shirekeep Gazette. President of the Imperial Correspondents Club.

Biography

Roy's father worked as a butcher in the Hogtown Quarter of Teldrin's urban ward whilst his mother, the redoubtable Pauline, held a vague official function in the rural ward of the town that appeared to combine aspects of notary, beadle and magistrate. It was never satisfactorily ascertained whether she was appointed to those roles by a competent authority or had appropriated them by sheer force of personality. It being Lunaris, no-one was minded - or cogent - to enquire.

Hillary, the father, ran a successful shop in town and also possessed a small motorised skiff which he would take out to offer choice cuts of succulent roast pork to passengers and crew on the passing river boats travelling down river from Shirekeep to Mesior and Musica. At eleven years of age, Roy, the third child in the family, was set to work earning his keep by making the precarious leap from the skiff onto the boarding stage of the river boats to tout the various grilled and roasted meats to bemused onlookers, who were more used to river urchins touting trinkets whilst trying to pick their pockets. The Red Elwynn narrowed at Teldrin, owing to the wrathful refusal of the Liches who then ruled over the Brookshire side of the river to countenance any effort by "breathers", let alone Imperial officials, that might impinge upon their jealously guarded sovereignty - irrespective of the merits of the particular proposals. This made the riverside city, in all other respects a wretched backwater, the perfect location for those seeking to profit from the river trade between Musica and the Benacian interior - by whatever means, the Teldrin Narrows were a favourite haunt for river pirates as well during the era when Imperial control outside of Shirekeep was at its weakest.

Hillary's energetic trading method brought him to the attention of Thorgils Tarjeisson, an enterprising Shirekeep businessman, and himself a butcher of some renown, who had moved to Goldshire after a falling out with the Vanic authorities of Elwynn. Like most Teldrin residents, Hillary could pass for sane when conversing with out-of-towners, and he was soon able to ingratiate himself by sending Roy, by then a strapping twenty-three year old veteran draft-dodger and apprentice butcher, to stand outside the Bethlem Hotel with a tray of grilled meats on a sizzling hotplate, whenever he knew that the ESB Group's troika, of Tarjeisson, Dravot, and Cryptsinger, were in residence. This ingratiating diligence was rewarded when Hillary received a contract to act as the ESB Group's local victualler in 1635. Further commissions followed in 1636 and 1637 as the Worshipful Corporation of Aldermen for the City of Teldrin increasingly fell under the influence of the powerful and fast growing conglomerate. Finally, in 1638, Hillary was named as the director of the Teldrin Transport Docks Board Ltd (TTDB), the ESB's front company for a system of quasi-legalised river piracy and enforced hospitality for vessels passing through the Teldrin Narrows. The following year, Roy, whose only schooling had been his father's belt and his mother's no less wrathful tutelage at letters, numbers and an inchoate collection of Cedrist psalms, was sent to Metzler University on a paid scholarship care of the Crown of Goldshire. That the Queen received a tenth of all proceeds obtained by the TTDB via a numbered account in the Ardashirshahr branch of the Imperial & Emirati Bank of Alalehzamin was a mere serendipitous coincidence.

Unfortunately for Roy, he had scarcely arrived in Shirekeep when, on 11th of Araroqpinu 1639, the declaration of martial law, precipitated Goldshire's rapid descent into all-out civil war. With his parents trapped in the company's besieged cantonment, the Sanitorium, Roy obtained a deferral from his business management course, for a small consideration paid to the Master of Darwin Hall, and joined on with the Jaysh al-Sathrati as a clerk attached to one of the logistic squadrons of the 3rd Division. Roy's habit of maintaining a written journal of daily events began during his four years of service with the Jaysh. The tendency of the Babkhi rank and file to resort to wholesale massacre, rapine, and the systematic abuse of any woman, girl, or boy, not fast enough to escape their clutches, sat ill with Roy, especially when his fellow Lunatics became the disproportionate focus of the Jaysh's murderous impulses. Roy suffered from the singular misfortune of being gassed by his own side at the Battle of Holwinn on the 19th of Filadinu 1643, when the collapse of the Jaysh in the face of the Army of the Golden Dawn prompted the panicked Imperials to drench the ruptured front line with every chemical and biological agent in their arsenal. Mercifully for Roy, if such a phrase could be used, he was caught in a sector in which Mustard Gas, rather than some of the nastier biological agents, was released. Irrespective of this, he was, for the moment, blinded and when his rescuers discovered him staggering out of a greenish-yellow fog bank and down towards the shores of a brackish tributary of the Elwynn he was already coughing up blood and lumps of his right lung.

Roy spent the next year and a half convalescing in a Red Orchid hospital, having twice narrowly avoided transferal to a hospice. Whilst he lay in bed, unable to read or to write, his journal had come into the possession of the Chamber of the Crypteia, eventually coming to the attention of the organisation's feared director. Using evidence obtained therein, Tokaray was able to construct a case against a number of junior and mid-ranking officers in the 41st Regiment. Their arrest and execution generated enough fanfare to placate the Kaiser Dominus and the defeated population of Goldshire who had demanded some measure of justice for the crimes inflicted upon them during the reconquest of the kingdom.