Well with her own transformation into a drak the Empire became the Mecca for the world of Gihon's rather
downtrodden drak population.
The problem was that old drak legends in Europe had
a sort of Doctor Jeckyll,Mister Hyde dual personality to them.
In the legends a drak was either
a) a slender river nymph who entired her victims into a
river with her seductive good looks and then drowned her victims
or
b) a huge scaly 14 foot tall river dragon woman-troll
who simply lurked beneath the surface,plucked her unsuspecting victims out of a passing boat and ate them and left behind their bones in her underwater cave.
So not surprisingly before Empress Giselda came along the
usual solution to humans turning into a drak
( actually a seven to eleven foot tall anthro fish-lizard gill woman )
was to just burn the emerging beast at the stake
lest either folk legend a) or b) come to pass.
So there weren't too many draks older then a few months
post-transformation
to set the record straight on what a drak was
basically a ill tempered scaly giantess with gills and fins
and webbing.
So when Giselda the Drak Empress arriving on the scene
in 1900 draks around the world made sure to make their
way to the nearest Emsland submarine or airship
to get out of a hostile human populace's pitchforks and torches
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Gihon-World War One,the Great Gihon-War
began with the most unlikely of circumstances in Emsland.
Giselda had invited Edward,the Crown Prince of
Gihon Britain over to Hapsburg Castle on the tenth
anniversary of her transformation into a drak.
So August 8th 1910.