Kitchen Mice Paintings

## Flitters Experiments

Some time ago, when the population of the Manor had grown from sparse to rather plentiful, J. Flitters, the keeper of the Mapparium at the time, began a series of experiments in Manorial population control using harvest mice. The harvest mice were kept in miniature replicas of the Manor. Each replica, or model, was a high-fidelity representation of the Manor with a few of its spatial parameters tweaked. An elaborate, rate-limited, Pavlovian punishment & reward system was used to coax the mice into different areas of the various models so as to create an incentive system for functional differentiation. Flitters believed the mice would learn to make optimal use of the Manor space given the right amount of cheese dispensed at the right location at the right time. The nature of the punishment aspect of the experiments remains unknown to this day, although some have speculated that solitary confinement may have been used, given that many of the models contained lockable cells. After many iterations of the experiment, Flitters was forced to admit that no such functional differentiation was possible; the mice simply foraged for cheese and then brought it back to eat in informal communal areas. This strange communal behavior, which Flitters referred to in his notes as “pathological clumping heretofore unseen in the wild,” found exception in “The Beautiful Ones,” a small group of mice that chose to disassociate themselves from the hordes of mice. They sought refuge in the highest towers of the Manor, spending their days grooming themselves and refusing to eat or breed. Because of these asexual and anorexic tendencies, and the pestilence bred among the clumping mice, each population of Flitters’ mice quickly died out. Flitters soon abandoned these experiments, but not before an anonymous at the Waterhouse Art Studio painted a series of portraits of the Beautiful Ones.

## Subsequent Reactions

The portraits of the Beautiful Ones were initially intended for display in the Valhallarium, but this project was quickly aborted. The portraits received harsh censure from critics, who called them “the works of a too-happy simpleton,” and “rodential pastoralism which careful chiaroscuro cannot save.” The biggest controversy surrounded the artist’s use of food in some of the portraits, which was in rather flamboyant defiance of what Flitters had written in his reports on the Beautiful Ones. The artist countered that Flitters must have been lying about the Beautiful Ones’ anorexia, for they “simply could not have maintained their lustrous fur without a steady diet of cheese and fruit, perhaps stolen under stealth of night while the clumping mice were sleeping,” but critics derided this as a flimsy pretext for “an unimaginative fulfillment of the requirement that the portraits be hung in the Valhallarium.” “Besides,” one critic noted in a letter to the Major Duomo, “the Valhallarium’s main proposition isn’t one of food, but of elevation. The consumption of food is ancillary to the primary act that goes on in the Valhallarium, which has something to do with *feasting*, an act that cannot be explained by the mere enjoyment and satisfaction derived from a nibble of cheese or a blackberry’s juicy discharges.” The portraits were instead hung, by decree of the Major Duomo, in the servant’s tunnel from the Valhallarium to the Kitchens.

## Today

The portraits can be found in the servant's kitchen tunnels. There are 5 of them total:

1. Beautiful One Eating Cheese and Blackberries
2. Beautiful One Grooming I
3. Beautiful One Grooming II
4. Beautiful One Leaning Out of Tower
5. Beautiful One On Throne of Cheese

Flitters' high-fidelity Manor models are still kept in a vault in the Mapparium, and are routinely exhibited during harvest season.