Cedar Jack’s Dodo Ranch – Google Docs
Cedar Jack’s Dodo Ranch
This sprawling (1,200 acre) poultry farm in southern Nebraska is not exactly hidden; it’s just obscure. There aren’t any neighbors, Cedar Jack’s Dodo Ranch is rural enough that the site has its own generators and sewage treatment, and the operators of the Ranch don’t advertise their products. Despite the name, nobody named Jack has owned the Ranch within living memory; currently, it’s competently operated by Greg and Linda Henderson. They took over the place twenty years ago, and plan to let their kids operate it, assuming that their kids want to run a free-range poultry farm that specializes in extinct birds.
Yup, extinct. You got your dodos. You got your moa. You got your great auks, although keeping them happy requires a certain amount of fiddling. You got your heath hens, there are also a bunch of obscure duck and chicken breeds that officially went extinct a long time ago, and every year a flock of passenger pigeons shows up to be carefully — very carefully — culled. Where all of these birds came from (and where the passenger pigeons go) is not relevant to the operation of Cedar Jack’s Dodo Ranch. The Hendersons don’t ask irrelevant questions.
What they do do is carefully maintain breeding populations of the various species found on the Ranch; the birds are bred both for their eggs and meat, for an extremely select clientele. The kind of clientele that mere Illuminati aspire to become. Presumably these patrons also take care of all the administrative and economic details, leaving the Hendersons to concentrate on their skill set: keeping birds alive, laying, and healthy.
They do an excellent job at it, too. There are no special outrages or horrors to be found on the property: the birds are well looked-after, are free-range, and not mistreated. In fact, the Ranch is operated extremely humanely. True, the birds are regularly culled for their meat, but that happens in ordinary chicken farms, too. It’s just that these birds shouldn’t exist.
Assuming that the party decides to react to this Ranch in a way that’s more profound than asking for a dodo egg omelet, extra salsa: attempting to bribe, suborn, or threaten the Hendersons will likely fail. They don’t exactly get paid to run the farm; it’s more like they don’t pay taxes, don’t pay for any equipment or supplies, and have no-limit personal credit cards that they never get bills from. And the Hendersons like running an extinct bird farm, particularly since the couple takes the admittedly-accurate position that humanity let these species all go extinct in the first place. As for threats: well, that’s just a nasty thing to do to a perfectly nice family of poultry farmers. And if you’re lucky, the Men In Black will even give you a fair warning along those lines before anything permanent happens to you.