Backstory

Nobody remembers hatching the first Baby Chick. One morning there were eggs. By lunch there were dozens, and by dinner there was a coordinated pecking campaign against a castle that had done absolutely nothing to them. That is the Baby Chick in a nutshell: no plan, no memory of a slight, no shortage of enthusiasm.

It is tiny, fast and full of unearned confidence — the kind of confidence that comes from never having lost anything more serious than a staring contest with a scarecrow. It has never seen a castle it didn’t want to peck, and it will peck it until either the castle falls or somebody feeds it. It does not know which outcome it prefers.

On their own, Baby Chicks are harmless to the point of adorable. In swarms they’re the flock’s version of a water-balloon fight: harmless individually, unstoppable collectively, and absolutely everywhere at once. The trick is not to let them accumulate — a funnel full of chicks is a funnel doing nothing else.