Erin Righ (ER-in ree | / ˈɛr ɪn ri /)

Erin has always been slightly overweight with it becoming more pronounced as he got older, but is in good physical condition otherwise.

Erin has magical prosthetics for his left arm and right leg that will transform with him.

Erin wears his hair long, and his face, bearded. There are laugh lines around his eyes and face that imply that he smiles frequently.

Erin can be identified by numerous tattoos and, most ostentatiously, his silver prosthetic left arm and right leg, which he keeps highly polished and bare when not on a mission.

Erin is generally equipped like a middle aged tourist. He has numerous IDs and passports, and is as visible or invisible as he chooses to be. He is also usually equipped to look like a local wherever he is.

7bd-4c347c5c31b2). Erin figured the Horde needed reinforcements, and instead attacked the now weakened Kraken and their allies among the House of the Sandwich on November 25th. They, too, proved no match for the Horde.

The Kraken escaped him, but many others rose to join the Horde and the remaining forces headed for The Warren. Erin left the Hammerheads in the Trench to assure that the Molluscans wouldn't return, but that meant he was without them for the final battle -- possibly his undoing.

Battle of the Warren

When the undead finally assaulted The Warren, Erin led them head on, while Gala flanked to the secret exits with an equal force, in a pincer maneuver. Erin had Sable defeated, the living were flagging, and the undead were growing stronger and stronger. As Erin lifted his Literomantic weapon to crush the yielding Bunny Mom, Gala burst in. With Sable's last burst of energy she blasted Gala with poetic love magic -- and he returned to life.

The renewed Gala turned all his new and old literomantic knowledge to defeating Erin, and Erin, who had reached into his reserves to beat Sable, had nothing left to fight him. Gala schooled his former master in the literomantic arts and left the Nite Qing staggered and beaten. As Gala's rage subsided, he took hold of himself and stayed the final blow that would have finished Erin once and for all.

"Kill me, boy," the Nite Qing gasped.

"No," he replied.

"Why not? Surely you must hate me by now?"

"Absolutely." He nodded. "I hate you with a passion, but I love my uncle, who is more like a third dad to me, and we're going to save him."

Erin noticed that in the exchange, Sable had regained her footing and keyboard, and turned to renew his efforts on her. As he reached into the final well of dark literomancy and began to type, Sable responded with two powerful letters that stopped him in his tracks.

"NO!" she typed, and he stopped.

I don't give you permission to include my family in this narrative!

— What Sable Aradia typed to stop the Nite Qing

And all at once, Erin was Erin again. The Tome released him.

"This is impossible!" screamed AuthorGoddess. Gala summoned a wind elemental of such force that it snatched the Iron Tome from her hands and delivered it to Sable.

"AuthorGoddess, stop!" she yelled, and the power of the Tome compelled her.

Aftermath of the Second Word War

Just like that it was over. Once again, the living had conquered the dead with the power of their words. The Great Houses had triumphed.

Erin felt he had nowhere to go. Who in the Great Houses could trust him now? So Erin slipped away quietly during the celebration, with his pack and his copy of Wind in the Willows. He left his weapons behind, determined that words had gotten him here and literomancy would save him. The former Nite Qing left a note for Sable;

My beautiful wife. I am leaving a note because I feel I cannot look any of you in the face. I will find a way to make this right, and when I do I will come home to you all. Until then, please know that I love you all, I promise to find a way to make it home. All my love, Erin

 

Prelude to the Spring Tourney of Tales

Sable begged Erin to return to the Warren after the end of the Second Word War, but he felt that after being the Nite Qing twice, he needed to do something to redeem himself. He sought out The Lemon Company to join their charitable works. However, in mid-January, there was a near-successful assassination attempt on his wife. Though initially he kept away for fear that the Nite Qing would try to take the Iron Tome from her, when she failed to recover after considerable time on life support, he came to her side and summoned Colin Walsh, a Gunslinger (paladin) Litwalker from their shared Wyrd West world, to heal her. The healing was still not complete, however, and Sable began the long process of recovery.   Erin still left as quickly as he could, since he still didn't trust himself.  

Tourney of Tales, April 2022

By the start of the Spring Tourney in 2022, Erin re-emerged as one of the faculty at the School of Worldcraft and Wordmancy, hosting a Study Hall on his Twitch channel and teaching the art of literomancy to the next generation. His presence at the school created some controversy. People wondered what effect this would have on the school and its students. But they needn't have worried. Erin's Study Halls turned out to be very popular, and he managed to raise a considerable amount of money for Kids Need to Read, a children's literacy charity.   From time to time during the Tourney, Erin and Sable came in contact with one another, and Sable begged Erin to come home; but he still didn't feel he was ready.   Then disaster struck. There was a second assassination attempt; this time a poisoning. The dose was lethal, and Sable Aradia went home to the Warren to die.   When he heard the news, Erin went back to the Warren to be with his wife in her final hours. Though it seemed too late, Erin begged Sable to let other people help her guard the Iron Tome; and Sable begged Erin to let her help him find his way to redemption.   But Aydan Nightshade had realized an important fact -- the Mother of Bunnies' abilities were powered by love, and her enemies had worked hard to isolate her by sowing distrust. A worldwide literomantic ritual was organized by the Kitty General and the Queen of Bats, in the hopes that the power of love would allow Sable to heal herself.   The ritual worked. Bolstered by the ritual, Sable recovered magically from her fatal poisoning when Erin took her hand.  

Tourney of Tales, July 2022

In the aftermath of the Tourney, Erin became one of a handful of Sable's most trusted companions and friends who took shifts in guarding the Iron Tome. He returned to the Warren and resumed his duties as the Royal Consort of House Lapin. He and WriterGreg built a campus of the School of Worldcraft and Wordmancy at the Warren and began teaching and running fundraisers for the school there.   Otherwise, Erin somehow managed to keep mostly out of the public eye, despite the very public lawsuit and scandal that his wife was involved in. However, when WriterGreg quit the GOT News Network live on air, he helped Greg to establish the SWW News Network and began broadcasting as a co-anchor with him from the Warren.  

Aftermath of the July 2022 Tourney

In September of 2022, the Carrot Throne publicly announced that Mykola Void, Archon of House Ailurus, and Aydan Nightshade, recently-appointed Panda Polemarch, were the daughters of Sable Aradia and Erin Righ. The former Kitty General took the name Senna Nightshade in honour of the newly-acknowledged relationship. No one is sure why this was never announced previously.   A few days later, Queen Siobhan was killed and Prince Jean injured in a car accident. Erin Righ and Queen Sable were both in attendance at the royal funeral, and the private wake after; as well as the Coronation of Queen TaraFaeBelle.   During this time, "the Lendri" engaged the services of two bodyguards; DragonMagpie and AttorraRu, who became known as the Night Watch. Rumour has it that they were seen chaining down or locking up the Prince Consort at night. █████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████   Just before the start of The Third Word War, WriterGreg contracted MancerMumps and was unable to continue broadcasting. Erin temporarily engaged Buddha Kwake, Prinx Tempest's husband, who was newly arrived from the 1337Speak Reality, as his co-anchor.  

The Third Word War

Erin took a more active role in the combined Lapin/Meles/Ailurus forces, which eventually became known collectively as the Woodlanders. He still hired out his trainees as mercenaries, but their services were routinely engaged by the Lapins. It is generally believed that guilt over his nephew Lord Galakrond becoming one of the two Night Monarchs was an excellent motivator.   Erin helped to guard the Lapin-Meles Portal when Windy Willows fell. In The Battle of Kin Beach Erin led the evacuation of the Warren, and therefore was not present for the death of Monkey Meles or the famous Turn Undead effect that landed his wife in the hospital with Critical Magic Drain.   After the Woodlanders fled to the Sauropoda Protectorate, Erin turned all his remaining resources to the support of House Sauropoda, including the SWW trainees. He and Buddha continued to broadcast SWW News from Mount Mitchell.   During the Battle of Mount Mitchell, Erin guarded the surviving Forgelings, determined to allow no more of the Meles-Lapin children to fall to the Undead Horde. The Undead were once more defeated, though Erin himself was left with cursed wounds and broken bones that would not heal.  
After 3WW, Erin returned to the Warren with the rest of House Lapin, and summoned another Litwalker healer — this time, Selene Wintermist Sunfall from the Toy Soldier Saga universe, to speed up the Mother of Bunnies' recovery time after more Critical Magic Drain. Since then, he has been quiet and seemingly happier than he has been in a long time. Staff at the Warren have reported to gossip magazines that Erin played Santa Claws at Tomesmas that year.

Tourney of Tales, April 2023

In the spring of '23, at the April Tourney, the Mother of Bunnies called on the Power Writers to make teams and take the 50k challenge, or support someone who was taking it. The challenge to write a Toam in a week, this time with the intention of powering Literomantic Batteries to be used in powering the wards necessary to trap the Nite Qing so that the curse he put on Erin could be undone.

After the Tourney, Erin was seen to be in good health and without the bandages that covered a good portion of his body. In the after party of the Tourney, the Royals announced that Erin was free of the Nite Qing's curse and that he, the Nite Qing, would not be a problem anymore.

Tourney of Tales, July 2023

By the time the Tourney of Tales happened, there was a plan in the works to transport as many people as possible from the 1337 Speak Reality through an interdimensional portal conjured up by Sable and Tempest from there to here as the 1337 Speak Reality was going to be recycled. To do it, they called on the 50k Challengers to write a toam to power the batteries necessary to aid in the opening and holding open of the portal.

Aftermath of ToT, July 2023

The plan, dubbed Operation GTFO, had been taking place on both sides of the reality divide for months as people prepared to move millions of refugees from one reality to another, theirs to this, in less than a week. People had to be mostly trained to walk together in a line without fouling up the line by moving to fast or too slow, or having a stride that was too short or too long. That took weeks to get right, hence why soldiers go through such rigorous training for 9-12 weeks in the Canadian, and therefore Lapin, Armed Forces. They didn't have 9-12 weeks, they had six and over a million people to train. So the Princess Rowean's Royal Light Infantry Regiment were dispatched in mid June during the portal tests and Erin did various covert missions on both sides of reality to gather intelligence until the Grand Exodus on August 1st.

Operation GTFO, August 1-7, 2023

Over the course of 6 days 22 hours and 40 minutes, which for the astute and the curious is 600,000 seconds, they moved over 3 million men, women, children and animals in vehicles and on foot from the 1337Speak reality to the Tome reality, until they were forcibly stopped by the 1337Speak's California National Guard minutes before the reality was recycled. As a miracle of miracles none of the refugees were killed, though a few had to be treated for heat exhaustion, and sun stroke. A cadet corporal from the 1337Speak side and four of the Mad March Hares, including the regiment's colonel, were missing, presumedt dead, when the portal closed while they were holding the line and the reality was destroyed. They were all posthumously awarded the Lapin Star of Valour and Companion of The Order Of The Badger's Paw.

Operation GTFO claimed one other person as well, Seneschal Prinx Tempest was claimed by the Void, which almost broke Sable. While Sable was mired in the Pit of Despair, and with Tempest lost to the Void, the Lapin Protectorate turned to Erin to lead them. Erin kept Sable's condition a carefully guarded secret and as far as the populous was concerned, Tempest was MIA and the Bunny Queen was suffering from severe magic drain, which was, at least, partially true in both cases.

Sable was severely emaciated from magic drain to the point that her "magic nerves" were burnt out and though she mentally recovered her senses in about 10 days, her physical, mental and emotional recovery would take months to come back to a semblance of normal.

The Fourth Word War

Erin was completely blindsided by the Nite Kween who had possessed his friend and confidant when he killed his nemesis, the Nite Qing and had been steadily driving her heart into cold undeath ever since. There was little doubt about the identity of the Night Monarch in this war. The dragon, AttorraRu, the Lapin Librarian, became the Nite Kween on November 1, 2023 and began the Fourth Word War in her fight to be recognised. Sauropoda was the first House to fall to the Fourth Horde and Good King Bob flattened Mount Mitchell with a swarm of meteors to keep the Nite Kween from getting any of the newly discovered Dinotech from the abandoned fortress. The force of dinomagic necessary to level Mount Mitchell was so taxing on King Bob, having flattened Aldergrove less than a year ago, that he was effectively incapacitated for the remainder of the War. Less than a week later, House Meles was swept into Ru's undead. about a week later saw the undead horde sack the Warren, and it was almost as though the Nite Kween took some sadistic glee in felling the Bunny Queen's Owsla and she came millimeters from ending Sable as well. Erin went to rescue Myko and wound up knocked unconscious by Myko's sleep dust and had to be carried out by Release and defended by his daughter. The Lapins fled to Zafforza City, to Sable's new friend Regent JCBoom. Relentlessly, having tasted the Bunny's blood, the Nite Kween came for Zafforza City and dropped massive depth charges on the city's subaquatic shields until it was pummeled and once again the Bunbun escaped with her Husband.

This time the survivors used the portals to transport themselves and the refugees to the Caverns in Australia, to Queen Tara. This is where the remaining people said "enough" and vowed to make their stand. The final onslaught of the war came on November 30th when the undead horde finally made their way to the caverns. The fighting was furious and the living were in just about full retreat when Sable came riding out of the Caverns on the head of Dino Bob's Tyrannosaurus battle form and thundered through the horde. This gave the remaining Tome Knights the courage/heart to fight back the slaughter.

Aftermath of 4WW

When Ru returned to Sable to beg forgiveness both she and Erin readily forgave her. Erin assured his friend that they would get through this together, and Sable gave her back her library key. Even though the vast majority of people killed in the war were resurrected at the end, Sable's Owsla were decimated six times over and both the Captain and Senior Commander were incapacitated. Captain James had taken a leave of absence to find himself after his experience as an undead, and Commander Stretch did not have enough body left after blowing himself up in an attempt to avoid undeath to be resurrected at the war's end. So, Gala had used necromancy to keep Stretch's Spirit, or Divine self, trapped in his head with his ego, or, loosely, his adult self. Basically Stretch was an animated severed head.

Sable decided with Stretch to keep that a very guarded secret, which made orders a little hard to relay as he was forced to do it remotely. In March of 2024, after discovering that a Company facility that Erin and Senna had cleared out the year before, hidden in an under-ice centre, was a cloning lab, and Senna seemed to recall that they had at least one clone of DM Stretch, and others of the Lapin royalty.

So, just before the April Tourney, Erin, Sable, Senna, Stretch, Sean "Bigwig" O'Shae, Regimental Sergeant Major Elaine "Jazz" Murphy, Master Sergeant Thumper Barnes, Master Sergeant Bethany Black, Dr. Max Ramsay, and about a dozen of the Houndstooth Company and The Mad March Hares embarked on a mission to Antarctica, to McMurdo Station, to recover the clone body of Stretch and see if the others could be easily disposed of.

After a series of misadventures and the destruction of McMurdo station, they returned with Stretch very much alive, but without two of the Houndstooth and without Master Sergeant Barnes. Bethany Black returned with her arm and shoulder broken and without her signature hammer.

The two members of the Houndstooth, named Sergeant Jaxsen Ford, and Master Corporal Janine Saunders were posthumously promoted and awarded The Lapin Star of Valour. Sergeant Major Thumper Barnes, was also posthumously promoted and awarded the Lapin Star, but Erin also awarded him Grand Commander of the Order of the Badger's Paw. The award carries with it a hereditary earldom which was awarded on his 5-year-old daughter, Countess Sable Rowean Barnes of the County of Wild Horse. The Wild Horse County encompassed much of what used to be Southern Alberta.

Cisgendered male

Erin is bisexual, and may be pansexual

Erin was privately educated in a secret program and holds the equivalent of a Master's degree in Linguistics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Nuclear Physics, Political Science and Psychology.

Most of his life, Erin has been involved in wetwork for the Canadian Government.

Erin is an accomplished literomancer, and considers it his greatest gift

Twice, Erin has been seduced by the "Dark Side of the Tome." He has been the cause of countless suffering and feels the weight of the world for it.

Twice, Erin has become the Nite Qing and remembers all the evil he inflicted with crystal clarity.

Erin is a genius, and knows it. Unfortunately this sometimes leads him to sound arrogant.

As Erin, he is a morally upright, progressive conservative who cares deeply for all the children in his life. As the Nite Qing, Erin was an amoral ███████ who sought only to further his own power, and didn't care who he hurt along the way.

Erin has a taboo against hurting innocent people. The Nite Qing is an amoral ███████ whose only taboo is self-harm.

Erin's current motivation is to redeem himself in his own eyes. Everyone ostensibly forgives him, but he holds a great deal of guilt and self-loathing, and hopes someday to be able to look at himself in the mirror without hesitation.

The Nite Qing is outgoing and often dupes others into thinking he is harmless and friendly. (In case this actually has to be said, he is not!)

Lately, Erin seems a lot happier. While his smile is still not quick to appear, when it does, it is warm and open. Some of his previous gregariousness has returned, and once again, he seems to be able to make friends and win loyalties easily.