As it turned out, the tried and true method of applying carrot and stick worked with the giants just as well as it did with so many other creatures. Giving them positive reinforcement when they acted in ways I approved of meant that they readily acted in those ways, although I made sure to gradually reduce the rewards they received. I didn’t want them to act for the reward; I wanted to get them accustomed to acting in a certain way, even without special rewards each time they did.

So, suppose a particular behaviour yielded them a large reward, such as visions guiding them to delicious game, a beneficial lesson, a tool dedicated and crafted for their use, or some other special reward. If they repeated the behaviour, their reward was smaller. A lesson out of order, a simple item, or, if the behaviour had been repeated a few times, I might simply reward them with a burst of pleasure, delivered by Mind Magic. Nothing over the top, nothing addictive, but I did my best to motivate the giants to start acting in ways I approved of.

On the other hand, there were the punishments. Those were less obvious. I didn’t want the giants to connect the punishments with me or my presence; I wanted them to mentally connect the punishments and their actions. As such, the punishments I used fit the misbehaviour fairly well. If they ate something that could be bad for them, like raw meat, I used a bit of Blood Magic to give them some serious gastrointestinal pain, if they messed around with fire, they might receive nightmares and wake up with a few light burns, if they wandered off the path I wanted them to take, they would get completely and utterly lost, until they returned to where I wanted them to go. It wasn’t quite as efficient as the positive reinforcement. Giants were just a little too hardy and hard-headed to be easily swayed by such punishments, but I had no doubt that it would work out eventually.

Now, I only had to figure out a way to introduce them to social dynamics and teamwork, and I would have the foundation of a society. So far, my best bet seemed to be introducing a common enemy, something that threatened the giants collectively and had enough power to force them to work together. Sadly, while there were some predators out there that could threaten individual giants, those predators were smart enough to realise that tussling with a full-grown giant was an excellent way to get themselves killed. Thus, there was currently no need for multiple giants to work together, but that was exactly what I needed to introduce.

After all, teamwork was what all societies were ultimately built on: the concept that working together allowed the society to accomplish feats an individual would never achieve on their own.

Whether that society was one of termites or ants, in which countless individual insects were accomplishing simple tasks to create some incredibly elaborate and grand structures or if it was a complex society, in which numerous individual people exchanged goods and services to create some extremely elaborate and complex social and financial structures. Maybe the difference was far smaller than anyone wanted to admit. When examining aspects like this, I realised that ants and termites might actually be better at the whole society and teamwork concept than humans are, though their extremely controlled and centralised approach had its own drawbacks and disadvantages.

There was no way the giants would ever develop a similar society. My best current guess was that their society would form into something similar to that of post-industrial revolution farmers or something along those lines. A society in which each family unit had its own home, ostensibly controlling an area around said home while having limited exchanges with its neighbours. Or perhaps with a central meeting and marketplace, where individuals could exchange goods and possibly services, as the different giants would hopefully develop their skills in different directions. But such diversification and specialisation would take some time; for now, the focus had to be on getting into the area around the Nexus, settling the giants down and having them start meeting one another without the meeting turning violent in some fashion.

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Lia brought up another fairly interesting topic that arose during our journey. She had been doing her own thing, as she hadn’t been all that interested in the giants in the first place, trying to see if she could make more vampires without converting other humans or Shattered. There simply weren’t enough of those to go around, which is why she had decided to study the blood of numerous beasts, ranging from the local giants to creatures that didn’t really have blood in the first place, like insects.

While the absolute prohibition regarding actual vampiric mosquitoes remained firmly intact, Lia had looked into other insects. Her primary interest had been their possible suitability as food, in case she ever needed an alternative source. Her experiments turned out to be quite useful, especially the revelation that hemolymph didn’t actually carry Astral Power and that Blood Magic used upon it had some fascinating results. I might have to do some experimenting there myself, just to get a better idea of what was going on, but that was, as so many things are, just another item on the list.

Her more interesting results, as one would expect, came from mammals. Her notes reminded me of some things I had learned in biology a long time ago, mirroring what I remembered of the cladistic classification quite closely. The closer to humans something was, the easier it was for her to interface with their Astral Power, allowing her to drain more from them.

Assuming that the drainage wasn’t from a willing target with the ability to resist her efforts. We had, out of curiosity, tried to determine where I would fit in her classifications, and the result was quite interesting. It turned out that when I wasn’t actively helping her drain Astral Power from me, she had pretty much no chance to get anything from my blood. Hel, she had a hard time getting my blood, period. It wasn’t that my blood was congealing rapidly, though I healed a lot faster than I should; it was that my blood seemed to be actively resistant to leaving my body. Why or how that particular aspect came about, I had no idea, but I currently blamed it on my Blood Magic or some other trait.

Still, it was quite interesting that either my Firn Elven heritage, now fully realised, or my slowly growing draconic side had such an influence over my biology. It also made me realise that a certain monthly visitor had been absent from my life since the change, making me wonder what that might mean in the future. It also brought about the question of draconic reproduction, either for me in particular, but also in a more general sense. I had created numerous creatures with draconic features, some of whom would usually lay eggs, others who’d give live birth, all without any particular rhyme or reason. Again, time would tell, though I made a note to check in on the draconic temple and the numerous proto-draconic beings I had left in its vicinity. Maybe there’d already be a few young ones, or some eggs waiting to hatch; it would be interesting. Once we reached the Nexus and set up a suitable base for me to shadow-step to, I could go back and take a look.

Thanks to my scrying constructs giving me a fairly wide perspective on our environment, I had realised that we would soon leave Canada once more and return to what used to be the USA. Alaska, to be precise. This made me wonder if crossing the former border would result in a larger number of Shattered or people, but I doubted it. Just like Canada, Alaska had been sparsely populated before the change, with a large majority living on the southern Coast. As of right now, I had no desire to travel in that direction, so I doubted we’d run into many people or former people, maybe somewhere along some river.

However, I doubted that a significant number of people had survived anywhere in Alaska’s interior. The area had been difficult to live in before civilisation collapsed, and those who had been living here generally didn’t have the specialised skills needed to survive without outside support and help. Maybe some of the native tribes had managed to conserve the skills and techniques used by prior generations but with the difficulties added to their survival by the change, I wasn’t willing to bet that many had actually survived.

Hopefully, I will be proven wrong. I wanted to see how the change might have altered the people here to let them survive, but until we saw some evidence of survivors, I would likely have to stick with the giants as the initial population of my realm.