54 AGE
M SEX/GENDER
The OA CANON
End of Part II CANONPOINT

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Working in the ER, the first time a patient of Hap's flat-lined, he heard a "whoosh" leave their body. Upon resuscitation, he heard it rush back in. His colleagues told him that many medical professionals imagine a similar experience. He refused to believe it was a product of his imagination and became obsessed with proving the survival of consciousness beyond death. At some point, he met and became the mentee to a doctor with the same conviction. Both he and this doctor, Leon, created their own experiments to kill and revive people to catalog what happens in between. Initially, anyone was suitable as a subject, but eventually he learned that anyone who hadn't naturally experienced a near-death before would not last as long as those who had.

While in New York to sell a patent on a heart monitoring device, Hap heard a violin playing in the subway. Entranced, it led him to Prairie Johnson, a near-death experience survivor who came to the city in search of her father. He intuited that she had died based on the transcendent quality of her playing. Initially, they got along very well: Hap was smitten with Prairie's candor and insight, while Prairie felt validated by his attention. She asked him to take her back to his home to study her. When she did, she was horrified to find out that meant confinement to an underground cell with three other kidnap victims. Due to her blindness, Hap allowed her upstairs to feel fresh air and sunlight. Her compassion and generosity captivated him when she got her hands on a knife and used it to prepare a sandwich for him, rather than attempt an escape. He made her his housekeeper after, an arrangement he became increasingly comfortable with. She used his underestimation of her to attempt poisoning him, and later pushed him down the stairs.

After Prairie's failed escape attempt, Hap expressed admiration for the concessions she managed to extract from him. Nonetheless, he revoked her privileges and never brought her upstairs again. This didn't stop him from imagining a special connection between them. As her relationship with the other subjects grew stronger, so did his envy. Measures she took to survive, like feigning her blindness after her sight was regained, he took as personal betrayals. Still, Hap confessed that, unlike the other subjects, he thought of her as a partner, and offered to leave America with her to continue the work, just the two of them. She refused.

Over seven years, advancements in the study enabled by Prairie changed the nature of it. Hap no longer sought to confirm and explore the afterlife, but to travel between dimensions. His pettiness shrunk his ambition from benefiting mankind to only himself. This came to a head when a local police officer entered Hap's home and witnessed his crimes. Hap shot him and his wife, then maliciously abandoned Prairie on the side of the road. By injecting himself and the other subjects with a lethal dose of sodium pentathol, he forced them to perform the Movements with him instead of Prairie. All five of them successfully crossed into another dimension, where they found themselves in a mental facility in San Francisco, run by that universe's Dr. Hunter Percy.

Assuming the life of Dr. Hunter Percy, Hap sheds all pretense of magnanimity. When Prairie finds him, he brushes aside her concern for the other subjects and calls the power they've discovered god-like. With the resources of the Treasure Island mental health facility, Hap undertakes a new effort: Mapping the multiverse. He wishes to control where he goes next rather than risk traveling blindly again. When he finds a dimension in which he and Prairie are married, one that will undermine her identity as the Original Angel, he devises a method to take her there that doesn't necessitate performing the Movements themselves (as she stated previously that she would rather die than help him again).

CURSE MARK | side of lower left ribs

A silver basilisk with black, star-speckled eyes. He is able to communicate telepathically through the network as normal, though his vocabulary and eloquence are greatly diminished. Very reflective scales make him difficult to find. His victims, however, are drawn towards him as the effects of their first encounter reach their peak. Omnivorous, he won't consume any human he doesn't have an existing fixation on.

TOUCH STARVATION | His stare induces a craving for physical contact that compounds over time. As it grows worse, the victim's sense of touch lessens until it vanishes completely. Intense despair and longing manifest from the isolation. Victims that seek him out in desperation for a cure will find they are able to feel him.
OBEDIENCE | Driven to compliance for a sensory fix, they will do whatever he compels them to.

In this form, Hap either won't or can't cure his victims. Apathetic to their suffering, he will typically command them to simply waste away. If he has an affinity or dislike of them under normal circumstances, he may make more vindictive demands, such as acts of devotion or self-destruction.