In fair Verona, where we lay our scene...

[Originally written June 30th 2020]

With the world set up, I just have to hatch some creatures. I normally name my creatures alphabetically, but I want to do something different this time and name according to a theme. I considered several potential naming schemes including Roman, Old Norse, and Celtic. I really would have liked to do Arthurian Legend, but unfortunately that’s rather short on named female characters (and most of them are called Elaine). I’m already doing Roman names for my Flight Rising dragons and I don’t relish the idea of typing those long Celtic names, so I seriously considered Old Norse, before finally settling on names from Shakespeare plays (likely with a bias toward the ones I’ve actually read or seen, but hardly limited to them).

I do ultimately want to keep both Grendels and Norns, together – including Banshee Grendels and Hardman Norns. That should be… interesting. The Ettins, I don’t particularly care about, so I won’t be teaching or nurturing them, and therefore I don’t want to waste good names on them. As such I’ve decided that the two Ettins shall always be known as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. If one dies, the replacement gets the same name. Yes, I know they’re female, but these are paired names and too long to be used elsewhere.

I decided to hatch the Grendels first, so I could properly “tame” them before introducing actual baby Norns. I started with a female Banshee Grendel called Cleo(patra), who was angry straight out of the shell. The first thing I did after getting her to the Holistic Learning Machine was to teach her how to channel her anger appropriately by beating the everloving crap out of the mechagrendel. Hit toy yes, hit norn no.

After a brief lunch break, I continued encouraging her to play with and hit toys as outlets for her boredom and anger. I also decided to bring a few random gadgets in for her to whack, since Grendels seem to enjoy that. Then it was off to the most important part of training – the dummy!

To my immense surprise, her first response to the Norn dummy was not to hit it, but to tickle it! I rewarded this behavior greatly and patiently waited for a negative interaction. I wasn’t about to tell her to hit Norns! To her credit, she only did this once, and I missed the opportunity to smack her for it. She went back to tickling on her own. Perhaps she won’t be as big a problem as I thought.

Satisfied, I moved her back to the Meso for the time being and hatched one of my stashed Jungle Grendel eggs. Antony expressed more boredom than anger, but went through the same training regimen as Cleo just to firmly cement in his mind that hitting toys and gadgets is okay. On moving to the dummy, he actually mostly ignored it at first, but ultimately decided to start hitting it. Surprisingly, he was more inclined to violence than the supposedly vicious Banshee Grendel! Eventually though, I returned him to the Meso. He and Cleo had both grown into adolescence and I was satisfied enough with their behavior to introduce actual norns to the picture.