Backstory

Some chickens hatch with a pecking order in their hearts. The Bureaucrat Chicken hatches with a scroll in its wing and a grievance in its soul. It carries the scroll at all times — through meals, through sieges, through the withering scorn of every other chicken on the field. It is not reading the scroll. It is waiting for the right moment to file it.

Do not underestimate the strongly worded letter. The Bureaucrat Chicken once got an entire wall demolished with one. The wall is still standing in the farm’s memory as a cautionary tale; the letter is framed in the coop’s main office, where it has inspired at least four other letters. Walls, fences and other physical obstacles are not obstacles to a bird that has learned that paperwork goes through things.

Its one vulnerability is also its entire personality: the scroll. Shred it, and the Bureaucrat Chicken has nothing to file, nothing to say, and nothing to stand on — just a bird holding a handful of confetti, staring at a wall it can no longer explain.