Not the owner, but seriously considering rewriting Twilight anyway.
After that episode of debilitating cramps, Caius had decided to do a little more research. He figured he would start by getting more information about the Children of the Moon. Surely there was more than what he'd already read. He may have had them hunted to the brink of extinction all those centuries ago, but apparently that hadn't stopped them from providing enough information for scholars to write textbooks about them.
Unfortunately, he'd already consumed all the information that their library had to offer on the subject. Much to his annoyance, nothing much had been written about werewolves past the 18th century, aside from one volume that had been published in 1965, a mere eight years prior.
From there, he decided to move on to researching human anatomy to shed some light on the subject of pregnancy. Admittedly, it was a foreign concept to him, and thinking about it unsettled him more than a little bit. Even looking down at his barely-protruding stomach unnerved him. These things just didn't happen to males, let alone vampires. Thankfully, a person's anatomy remained more or less the same once they became a vampire, so he took some comfort in that.
To his relief, the textbooks on human anatomy had plenty of information, and there were many volumes available. Most of them had been published after 1912, but some of them were from the late 18th century, and there was even one from the early 1600s.
"Well, then. Let's get to work." Caius tucked his pencil behind his ear, opened the first textbook, and started to read.
Over the next few hours, he discovered several things he hadn't previously known.
First of all, the average human pregnancy lasted nine to ten months, which were sectioned into trimesters. Each trimester had a set of symptoms assigned to it, though sometimes symptoms could either extend beyond the boundary or be shorter than three months.
Second of all, the number of symptoms experienced tended to vary, depending on the mother and their baby. Some experienced nausea throughout their pregnancies, whereas some had none at all. Other symptoms included back pain, fatigue, varicose veins, and occasional bleeding. He was glad that, due to his vampiric state, he was able to eliminate several symptoms from his list.
Unfortunately, these textbooks only covered how pregnancy affected humans. Try as he might, he couldn't quite line up what was happening to him with this template, and it frustrated him to no end.
After some deliberation, Caius decided to revisit that medical journal he'd glanced through the other day. Perhaps, in his haste, he'd unintentionally glossed over relevant information.
Now if only he could remember where he'd put it.
After another five minutes of searching, he located the volume on a high shelf that required him to stand on a chair to gain access to it.
"Aha!" He reached up and grabbed the journal. It looked like it hadn't been touched since he'd last looked through it. He'd hoped that he wouldn't have to look through it and read about that horrid experiment again, but he knew it was his best bet to learn how to navigate his own pregnancy and get through it relatively unscathed.
Over the next couple hours, Caius read through the journal carefully, being sure to write down anything that seemed important to know. More than once, he'd considered lobbing it across the room in disgust. He didn't know what kind of an animal would conduct an experiment like this.
Just get through it and translate what pertains to your situation, and then you never have to look at it again.
Despite the gruesome nature of the journal, there was a lot of information that he hadn't looked at before, and it ended up being more helpful than the anatomy texts. Much of the information was the same, but there were major differences.
The first distinction was the duration of the pregnancy. As he'd read before, the average duration for that of a human was nine months, give or take a couple weeks. On the other hand, the vampire in the experiment had experienced an accelerated pregnancy of about five months.
The second was the appearance of cramps, much like the ones he'd suffered two days prior. According to the text, approximately six weeks into the experiment, the subject had complained of paralyzing cramps that lasted for several hours, and upon examination, it turned out that a birth canal had formed, and that was what had caused the excruciating pain. It would later allow the subject to give birth to their child naturally.
"That explains a lot." Caius sat back in his chair with a sigh and looked down at his stomach. According to his calculations, he was about seven weeks pregnant.
The equivalent of 14 weeks. You've made it out of your first trimester. Congratulations.
He let out a humorless chuckle at his inner monologue. Of course he would say something like that to himself in a situation like this. Anything for a chuckle, right?
"Hm." Caius' gaze shifted to his watch. 10 PM. "Well, then. I suppose I'm done for the night." He closed all the books in front of them before putting them all back on their respective shelves. "Athena ought to find some of this interesting." He grabbed his notebook.
Time to hit the showers.
Yay information!