Darby "Crumbleboy" Hatfield

Darby “Crumbleboy” Hatfield (1801-1909) was a doctor and mad scientist who served as a medic for the 17th Michigan during the United States Civil War. He abandoned his post after experiencing “electricity” during the Battle of Antietam.

From there, he used his newfound talents to bring sentience to wild animals in Confederate territory. He was taken captive at the Belle Isle military prison in 1863 after animating the first Not Deer. In a Virginia newspaper, he stated that his goal was to “create an army of freedom-fighting forest critters.” In prison, Hatfield experienced brutal conditions, and passed his time granting sentience to various squirrels, chipmunks, bats, wild pigs, and coyotes. One such coyote was “the chupacabra,” according to Hatfield, although nobody had any idea what he was talking about.

During the chaos of the Battle of Walkerton in February of 1864, Hatfield was captured by a group of vampires called the All-American Suckers who were working on behalf of Abraham Lincoln to eradicate all non-human sentient life. He was brought covertly across enemy lines to Washington, DC and was presented directly to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln explained to Hatfield that the Not Deer had joined forces with the Suckers. These were to be the only sentient nonhumans to remain on Earth, and Hatfield was no refrain from his activities.

After the Civil War, Hatfield returned to his home in West Virginia to participate in the Hatfield-McCoy feud.

After the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901, Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the late Abraham Lincoln, found Hatfield in his lair along the Cheat River near Rowlesburg, West Virginia to conscript him to create a race of sentient flowers to protect the White House from what he saw as his personal curse (being present for every US presidential assassination and attempt up to this point). The flowers, mostly roses, were made sentient. President Theodore Roosevelt noticed this in the summer of 1904 and proceeded to kill all of them and preserve them in fromaldehide. Roosevelt ordered Hatfield, now 103 years old, to be sent to German East Africa. There he was imprisoned in the Heart of Darkness, a high security prison for “vivimancers.” There, for the remaining years of his life, Hatfield imbued several tribes of mountain gorillas with sentience. The leader of one tribe was known as Cants A, father of the famous ape leader Cantsbee.

He died in 1909 after conscripting an army of moths and flies to raise him into the sky so he could “reach heaven.” The operation was interrupted by a breeze of approximately 5 miles per hour, sending Hatfield falling to his death from a height of approximately 7 feet.