Dessert plate for the Opening Reception of the 138th Most Illustrious Congress of the Illuminati Menu for the Opening Reception of the 138th Most Illustrious Congress of the Illuminati

Since the moment he capsized on the island the pig was his nemesis. In a violent storm on his third night, the pig crashed through his makeshift shelter, so he slept in the freezing rain. It pilfered the fruits he harvested from the forest, and uprooted the potato garden he tended. Its incessant nocturnal squealing left him exhausted each morning. So on the night when he finally succumbed to fever from an infection'a cut on his foot caused by the trap of broken shells he had laid around his camp'and crawled out to the beach to gaze at the vast black sky, he was surprised when the pig came and silently laid down beside him. He was comforted as he felt the pig's breath slow to match his own as he finally drifted off to sleep.

Lucien Hargroves burned the skin off of his index finger on his first attempt and nearly incinerated his hand on the second, but the third time he was able to channel the image of fire in his mind into a thin jet of flame that erupted from tip of his wand, setting his library curtains on fire. He would have extinguished them, but the mental strain of pyromancy rendered him unconscious. He perished in the resulting inferno, as the fire department was unable to stop the magical flames engulfing his home. Fortunately, the fire was contained to an exactly 100-foot radius around the wand, which was the only thing investigators found remaining in the pile of ash.

Mom and dad were trying and she appreciated it, but Julia Krymotzk knew a pair of four-century-old vampires had no business trying to decorate a college girl's dorm room. She was a two-century-old young adult, and it was time she made decisions for herself. Also, the bat was very cringe, especially with some of her therianthropically non-conforming dorm mates.

Benita Gualdez fell ill in the spring, was bedridden for weeks, but her mood was lightened by the sound of a robin outside her window. The robin sang to her each day as she was confined to her room, watching her friends play and the world turn without her, as spring turned to summer and summer to fall. Her strength gradually returned, until the morning she took a tentative step out into the crisp autumn air. The robin lay on her doorstep, stiff and silent, and she always wondered after that if it had given the last of its strength to her.

It lifted Evelyn Cronnister’s heart to watch an octopus soar gracefully through the air. She was the fifth generation of the Boreal Bay Cronnisters, competitive show jumping octopus breeders who had been breeding so long that the mild neurotoxins absorbed through the skin when handling octopi had addled her brain into believing competitive octopus show jumping was an actual thing.

Few people knew about the small but thriving pod of ichthyosaurs living at the bottom of Pyramid Lake outside of Fernley, Nevada. Fewer still knew about the black ops government program to train the extremely intelligent Paleolithic fish to infiltrate and sabotage foreign black ops dolphin-training programs. Chester, the greatest black ops ichthyosaur agent of them all, single-finnedly averted nuclear catastrophe in 1986 when he intercepted a rogue Russian black ops dolphin agent, Mishka, that had been mindwiped and programmed as a sleeper agent by a terrorist cell of octopi inexplicably operating out of landlocked Kazakhstan. Chester sacrificed himself to detonate the bomb that had been meant for the United Dolphin Nations meeting in New York Harbor. The tale of his heroic deeds, secret to all but a few, will not be forgotten by those few, but will most likely be greeted by skepticism or outright mockery by everyone else,

Though Caroline was betrothed to the Duke of Winstrop, she loved the stableboy William. And so when her father had him executed on a contrived charge of treason, she secretly had his heart removed from his body and stitched into it every one of the love notes he had written her. On her deathbed years later, the Duchess of Winstrop told her daughter she would learn the true identity of her father if she searched her heart.

Following an earthquake in Takayama, Japan, fisherman and amateur cryptozoologist Shingo Shoritabe discovered several unusually large catfish swimming in a nearby lake. Based on strange, tattoo-like markings on their back, he suspected they were the offspring of the legendary Namazu.

Elementary school music teacher Alana Alceron of Winnipeg, Manitoba had picked a place as far away from the sea as she could find because she couldn't bear to smell the salt air. Her father thought it proposterous that Alana would give up her Atlantean heritage'the seahorse sigil of her family was synonymous with the finest musicianship in the kingdom'to teach music to the spawn of landwalkers. And it was true, the instruments on land never resonated as richly to her ear, but she found the surface dwellers' musical scales to be beautifully delicate and so much more free than the heavy, enveloping tones underwater.