Wherein I (attempt to) tell all of you how a vampire's mouth works.
The original piece on this was quite short, and in fact the length diminished over time as a general trend until part eleven, which I called a blurb as it could not pass for an article in its own right.
As pretty much everybody but Stephenie Meyer knows, vampires have fangs. Their placement can vary depending on age (Rudolph's and Anna's fangs are their maxillary lateral incisors* rather than the canines themselves (as would be the case for Gregory, Frederick, and Freda)), but they serve the same function for vampires of all ages: puncture someone's (or something's) skin to allow the vampire to drink the blood from the victim. These bites have the effect of turning the victim into a vampire, as well, shown by the cows and the caretaker (poor sap), implying that coating the fangs is a substance typically called venom. It takes a little while for the venom to take effect, anywhere from approximately six hours for cows to approximately twenty-four hours for humans, which indicates that for whatever reason (anything from blood volume to organism complexity), it takes its sweet time coursing through the body and working its magic (for want of a better word).
*I had to look this up. I found it in a very lengthy description of Rudolph that's somewhere online for a Young Dracula roleplay, I think, but I couldn't access the page again, so I had to find the term elsewhere. For those as dentistry-challenged as I am, it means those teeth just inside the canines.
In the original piece, I went also into a discussion of the vampire palette and somewhat into sensory capabilities, particularly smell, as far as they pertain to the perception of the taste of something. The tongue can percieve only five "flavors": sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami (savory/meaty, which I've heard described to me as the ability to taste MSG). Smell, I've read somewhere, is actually a bigger component of the perception of a taste of something than the sense of taste itself. For example, when you are sick and can't smell anything to save your life because of congestion, your chicken noodle soup tastes rather bland. Based on these bits of information and some basic knowledge of vampire lore, I came to two conclusions: that blood smells amazing to the vampire, thus causing the craving commonly known as bloodlust; and that vampires have a fundamentally different arrangement of tastebuds from humans that allows them to percieve a taste in blood beyond "metallic", and to possibly distinguish between blood types. Conclusion number one implies, I should note, either an altered set of nasal chambers (coming closer to that of a wolf, for example) or, more likely based on a rather painless-looking transformation, that the ability to smell blood is present in us all but enhanced by the venom's presence in the body.
In general, the vampire mouth contains relatively few (but hefty in and of themselves) differences from the human mouth. They come with the territory of being "bloodsucking fiend[s]" (courtesy of Lord McAshton, who's been completely scared to death by Rookery by the time he utters this), and are one of the many changes the venom actually forces upon a victim.
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