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Mason had named all the mice. Anna, Ben, Cici, Doug, Ernie, Fern, Gina, Hank, Sue, Tom, Willy, Xena, Yenta and Zack. Each sequential pair was kept caged together in a male female pair, because part of what she was testing was their fertility. Yenta and Zack, Sue and Tom, and Anna and Ben were the six she'd started with. The two control pairs had already produced a litter of offspring apiece - but the ghouled mice had not. She had drawn the conclusion several weeks ago that ghouled mice were infertile, however, some hints to the contrary had led her to do an experiment. She took a new female mouse, Peppy, and put her in a cage with Ben for the three nights Peppy was in heat. Sure enough, she could feel that Peppy had conceived a litter with Ben. So... perhaps it wasn't that the vitae made the mice infertile, but that it made the females stop going into heat, thereby eliminating their signal to the males that they could conceive? She had noticed that a few weeks after the first taste of LSv, Anna had stopped going into heat. Cici and Gina had also both stopped their biweekly estrus cycle, though Fern still was having them. She checked Anna, Cici and Gina again, very cautiously - she had discovered the very FIRST thing about ghouled mice was that they bit more than twice as hard as normal mice. They'd bit right through her regular lab gloves more than once.
Mason wrote up her new hypothesis in her lab book in neat handwriting. On the next page, she started addressing the differences between the mice fed the different strains of vitae. So far, there were not any major differences. The minor differences were: the mice fed Lyness's blood seemed to evoke less hostility from the control mice, just slightly; the mice fed NSv were losing a bit of hair, but not yet noticeable except in excess shedding. And the mice fed LSv had become slightly pickier eaters.
She outlined her next experimental phase. Put new mice on one of the blood strains, probably Lucille's as she had the most reliable source of that, for obvious reasons. Take Ben off it and see how he reacted. Put a male mouse without the blood diet in with Anna. Run tests on Anna to determine the mechanism of her halted estrus cycle.
Lastly she noted that the mice fed MWv did not seem appreciably different from the control mice Sue and Tom. Perhaps this was the difference between her vitae and Lucille's or Lyness's? She could find no other notable variance as of yet.