She scents each one in turn.

The blue smells pleasant, but not in a food-like way - more like pressing your face into a clean, warm towel fresh out of the dryer.

The yellow smells transfixingly, fascinatingly disgusting, like the kitchen scraps from a mouthwateringly decadent and hideously expensive thanksgiving dinner that have only just barely begun to fester.  If, when she was human, she ever watched or participated in the dissection of a human body and found her mouth watering, she will be vividly reminded of it here.

The clear smells like vampire venom.

The black smells strongly and vividly of nothing, with complex notes and undertones of nothing else.

She tastes them, one by one.

The clear tastes like rubbing alcohol and a kick in the side of the head, and replaces the burn of vampire thirst with the burn of strong liquor.  It's nearly as intense, but it is a discomfort that demands nothing of her, content to sit motionlessly on her tongue.

The too-soft laundry scent of the blue expands aggressively into her nose.  It is sensorily pleasant but a bizarre and offputting flavor experience.  It leaves her throat feeling cool, like she's a human being again having just swallowed her first mouthful of ice water on a summer's day out.

The yellow tastes like it smells - as though animal blood could be as enticing as human.  For a moment she forgets how she could ever have wanted to taste something uncomplicatedly pleasant.  She finds her thirst renewed, but only slightly, a gentle prickle, and with the odd but unpressing desire to walk down to the beach and stick her head in a pile of dead seaweed.

The black is so flavorless that it seems to disappear on her tongue, almost like trying to drink water in a dream.  It leaves her feeling nothing at all in her throat, a blankness she only distantly remembers from her humanity.  She loses her train of thought, feeling momentarily vacant and distant, and when she comes to she finds she had spent about two thirds of a second staring intently at a blank patch of wall.

She swirls her flute of - hmm.

"You say these are ready for production," she says.  "Do they have names?"

"We're calling that one Interlude," he says, indicating the glass in her hand.  "Fromage, Quench, and Kick."  The yellow, blue, and clear, respectively.

"This feels like it may have side effects," she says.

"They all have side effects," he says.  "It's an inevitable result of the way vampires metabolize their food.  There isn't really any such thing as vampire psychology absent the effects of a particular diet.  The goal is for them to be preferable to the side effects of human blood."

"Sure," she says patiently, "but."

"I apologize, that's an elementary point, you're right," he says.  "Interlude's disorientation never lasts more than two seconds, even at a dose that will take you from starvation to complete satiety.  Some people report worse reaction times, but generally within normal vampiric variance.  We hear a lot that it helps with anxiety and dulls vampiric instincts.  It reminds some people of humanity, if they have vivid memories of it."

"But...?"

He sounds at once sly and apologetic.  "It reduces the intensity of the mate bond."

Her eyebrows climb right up her face.

"That's going to be unpopular," she says.

"We expect protests," he says, not sounding particularly concerned.  "And the Empire doesn't like it because it makes the eyes look hungry."

"Interlude's going to be controversial for a very long time," she says.  She regards her glass of it.  "I do like it as a palate cleanser, though.  I may drink it regularly, I don't expect to mate myself and I've never felt especially - reverential - about it."

"Nor I," he says.  "We have plenty, you're welcome to it during the tasting."

"Tell me more about their respective long-term effects," she says.