angelhunter: (0)
Dr. Hunter Aloysius "Hap" Percy ([personal profile] angelhunter) wrote 2023-12-20 07:35 pm (UTC)

canon history.

content warnings: Serial: drugging, kidnapping, imprisonment, forced human experimentation, physical and psychological torture, murder. Gaslighting, manipulation, sexual coercion, Lima syndrome, ableism, quasi-deadnaming, abuser mentality, victim blaming, bodysnatching.

PART I:

Hap claims to have hated medical school for how professors and peers looked down on him for asking the "interesting questions" -- the ones without answers. The mystery surrounding consciousness and what happens to it upon death. Early into his medical career, he is working in the emergency room when a patient died and is revived soon after. In that moment, he hears what he describes as a "whoosh," a sound he considers distinct evidence of consciousness leaving and returning to the body. This experience solidifies his obsession with death and people who have experienced it.

Over the next couple decades, Hap dedicates himself to the study of near-death experiences. He excavates the ground under his home and builds cells within to house his subjects. These people he acquires through advertising the study and offering monetary incentives; he gets a pilot's licence to fly them personally to his cabin, avoiding paper trails. There, they are repeatedly subjected to a procedure which allows Hap to kill and revive them, in as safe and humane a manner as possible. On top of the readings taken during the procedure, he interviews them about their experiences afterwards.

This all proceeds relatively smoothly until, by sheer coincidence, he meets Prairie Johnson, an NDE survivor who returned to life without her sight. Her disability lowers Hap's guard and compels him to provide her small freedoms he's never given other subjects. For a time, she works in his home as his housekeeper, until the day she pushes him down the stairs and tries to escape. Hap confines her thereafter to the basement lab but maintains a fixation on her, which worsens as her bond with the other captives grows. Prairie regains her sight during the escape and thereafter refers to herself as OA, which Hap does not acknowledge.

After having become accustomed to Prairie as a fixture in his life, Hap feels increasingly excluded by the subject group and aware of his own loneliness. He observes them making discoveries of their own regarding the study, despite measures he's taken to ensure they remember nothing after the interviews. Nonetheless, he comes to the realization that what they see upon death isn't another plane of existence, but other dimensions. A subject confesses that they are working together to learn a series of movements that will allow them to escape Hap by traveling into another universe.

Around this time, Hap is forced to kill his mentor and the only other person who knows about his study (and conducts one of his own) in self-defense. He asks OA to abandon the others and continue the research with him elsewhere, which she refuses. His desperation to achieve interdimensional travel reaches a breaking point when he murders a police officer and his wife, who entered his home and witnessed his crimes. As punishment for rejecting him, he abandons OA on the side of the road. He forces the remaining four subjects to perform the Movements with him instead, by injecting all of them, including himself, with a lethal dose of sodium pentathol.


PART II:

Hap and the others awake in San Francisco and overtake the bodies of this new dimension's counterparts. Learning from his environment, Hap assumes the role of Dr. Hunter Percy, a renowned psychologist and psychiatrist, whose therapy incorporates quantum theory. He runs Treasure Island mental health facility, where Hap's subjects are now his patients. Assimilating, Hap discovers Percy is secretly working with a tech mogul named Pierre Ruskin to acquire the bodies of people Ruskin lured to a strange property.

This house, owned by OA's alternate universe counterpart, Nina Azarova, is essentially a window into the fabric of the multiverse. The people who enter invariably go mad and die. The corpses are delivered to Treasure Island where Percy, now Hap, performs a peculiar autopsy. He coaxes vines to grow out of their ears, which immediately flower. Ingesting the petals of these flowers grants him a glimpse into another universe. Afterwards, the corpses are preserved in a pool where the vines continue to grow and connect, forming a map of the multiverse.

Hap has Rachel, a subject, assist him with these autopsies. After OA becomes a patient at Treasure Island and reunites with the others, Rachel finds the courage to attack Hap. Hap accidentally breaks her neck. Burying Rachel's body, he explicitly blames Prairie for her death.

When OA arrives in the body of Nina, a Russian heiress, Hap confines her to the facility with the others. He places Homer in charge of her care in an attempt to break her bond with him. Homer is the one subject who did not overtake his counterpart's existing consciousness in the jump; he is now a psychiatrist who believes OA/Nina to be unwell.

OA escapes the facility and Hap tasks Homer with tracking her down. Meanwhile, he meets another interdimensional traveler, Élodie. From her, he learns how OA was able to locate them across dimensions, how to detect other travelers, and how to travel with fewer than five participants. He intends to abduct her to discover more but she evades him. Hap returns to Treasure Island and bargains with one of his former subjects for information, soon betraying and killing him. The flower that grows from his corpse is Hap's key to finally making Prairie (OA) his partner.

OA returns to Treasure Island, the consciousness of Nina Azarova back in control of her body (with both identities sharing it). She demonstrates familiarity with Dr. Percy that Hap lacks, leaving him nonplussed. Nonetheless, he accommodates her request to see what he and Ruskin have been doing with her money and property. The pool of corpses shocks OA back to the surface, who reiterates her disgust with Hap. She flees and he pursues her into a courtyard. There they are joined by Homer, who has integrated both his identities like OA and Nina have. Hap reveals the monuments surrounding them are robots that perform the Five Movements. He states he is taking OA to a dimension where everyone calls her OA except herself. Hap shoots Homer and OA ascends into the sky. She begins to glow before jerking in the air as if suspended by faulty wires.

OA falls to the ground as she and Hap jump universes. They "awake" on the set of The OA television show. OA lies bleeding in the ground, unconscious. Hap learns her name is Brit. As OA is loaded into an ambulance, Hap rushes after, stating he is Jason Isaacs, her husband.

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