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OOC
Player Name: Pink
Pronouns: she/her
Player Age: 33
Player Timezone: PST
Anything you MUST have warnings for? Nope
Other Characters in Game: None
Plurk (if you have one): verhoeven
Other Contacts: PM
Invite source: invite request

IC
Character Full Name, Western Order: Hunter Aloysius Percy
— Diminutive, if applicable: Hap
Character Chronological Age: 54 (unconfirmed, assumed)
Character Visible Age, if different: N/A
Character Gender: Male

Canon: The OA
Canonpoint: End of season one

( content warnings for entire app: Serial: drugging, kidnapping, imprisonment, forced human experimentation, physical and psychological torture, murder. Gaslighting, manipulation, sexual coercion, Lima syndrome, abuser mentality, victim blaming. )

ONE paragraph synopsis of character and canon premise: An anesthesiologist and emergency care doctor, Hunter Aloysius "Hap" Percy is obsessed with near death experiences. He attempts to substantiate the survival of consciousness beyond death for the benefit of mankind, by any means necessary. Hap lures NDE survivors to his remote cabin, imprisons them in glass cells beneath the house, and periodically drowns them using an apparatus that submerges only their head. He revives them after death to acquire further data, rinse and repeat. His most recent victim, Prairie, broadens the scope of Hap's work by introducing the possibility of multiple universes. His focus shifts from a (in his opinion) noble endeavour to the increasingly personal pursuit of cosmic understanding and power.

Character Personality:

• obsessive: Hap's entire life revolves around his research. His entire home is dedicated to it, as is every waking moment. In fact, he deems sleep "a waste of time, but necessary" and only accomplishes with sleeping pills. Every one of his doors is keypad locked and every room, upstairs and downstairs, monitored by camera to protect his research. When away from home, he keeps an eye on these feeds on his laptop and controls them remotely if necessary. He appears to have no relationships besides those with his subjects and his mentor (who conducts similar experiments of his own). Hap will fixated on individuals that can further his research, none more so than Prairie. Making her his partner becomes a close secondary obsession with him, driven by her unique metaphysical insights and the bond he imagines that creates between them.
  
  
• meticulous: Hap's study has beenrefined to perfection. He "built his lab himself" underground, soundproofed and fed by a natural spring. Adjoining glass cells allow captives social interaction to manage their mental states. Lighting changes and food is dispensed on a timed system, taking menial tasks off Hap's shoulders and minimizing his contact with the subjetcs. When it comes time to retrieve them for experiments, he sedates them with a scopolamine-like gas that puts them in an extremely suggestible state. On top of preventing physical struggle, it spares them psychological trauma by obviating memories of their death and resuscitation. Hap is also a capable engineer; besides the equipment used in the study, he invents medical technology to fund his research through the sale of patents.
  
  
• detached: Hap considers himself a scientist, first and foremost. Empirical proof of life beyond death will revolutionize not only science but the world, though Hap doubts he will achieve it in his lifetime and seems content to have lain the foundation for the next generation of researchers. He whitewashes the inherent cruelty of the experiment by minimally interfacing with the subjects and focusing on the data. Hap believes he's removed his ego from the equation, a fundamental self-deception considering the chasm-steep power imbalance between him and his captives.
  
  
• petty: Hap nevertheless has flashes of pure vindictiveness. These revolve around Prairie, who denies him her acceptance and willful collaboration. Homer is a subject with whom Prairie shares a genuine bond. Hap coerces him into seducing a new subject, Renata, and patches the sound of their intercourse over the lab's PA to devastate Prairie. When another subject, Scott, reveals Prairie has been lying to Hap, he's so blinded by rage he accidentally kills Scott, then takes his body back to the others and blames his death on Prairie. Lastly, when Homer and Prairie are able to physically touch for the first time, Hap drags her away, drugs her, and drives her out to the middle of a mountain highway. There, while pinning her down and holding a knife to her throat, he berates her, tears the strap of her dress, and then abandons her -- not only on the side of the road, but in that universe, as he leaves it and takes her friends with him.
  
  
• lonely: Hap's most exploitable weakness is his loneliness and his reluctance to acknowledge it. The significance of two brief but potent interactions is all it takes for him to offer Prairie the position of his housekeeper. Though she's still very much his prisoner, Hap treats the arrangement as more and more normal as the months go on. At one point, his guiding touch lingers on her hand; at another, he asks if she's doing her hair different and remarks that it looks nice, with the ease and familiarity of a friend or partner. Even after that arrangement ends sourly, he tells her that, unlike the other subjects, he thinks of her as a partner in his research. Prairie notes that Hap, unlike the captives who have each other, has nobody except his mentor Leon. When Leon violently attempts to seize Hap's research, Hap is forced to kill him. Noticeable shaken, this prompts him to invite Prairie (now known as OA) to run away with him and continue the work together elsewhere. Her staunch disinterest further destabilizes him.
  
  
• manipulative: Hap is aware this his behavior is unethical, or he wouldn't go to such lengths to cover his tracks or feel the need to obfuscate it to attract new subjects. He's adept at recruiting them with promises of remuneration and a sense of purpose. He charms Prairie, who has been sheltered and medicated all her life, into feeling special and seen. When an approach fails, like his offer to fly Renata out of Cuba, he uses what he's learned of his target and changes tack: forcing Homer to get her alone and seduce her. In the midst of this, Homer flees the hotel to escape Hap. However, Hap catches up with him and gaslights him about his chances of getting any justice in a foreign country.

Character History:

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.

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 Prairie to abandon the others with him and continue the research on their own 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 refusing to be his partner, he abandons Prairie 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.

Physical Details: 5'11", medium broad build. Maintains the strength necessary to haul adult men in and out of wheelchairs. He speaks with a nonspecific American accent. Medically, he is dangerously allergic to tomatoes and an insomniac, reliant on sleeping pills. Habitual smoker.

Does this character use any disability aids? What are they and what is their purpose? Hap wears glasses 90% of the time. Occasionally, he removes them in his own home while not engaged in work.

Is the character bringing a pet? Describe them. No.

Inventory upon arrival:

1. keys to his plane (useless)
2. Prairie's violin, just to mess with him
3. syringe of sodium pentathol

Suitability

What elements of the game are you most interested in engaging with? The mystery surrounding why characters are there and why subversion is so harshly punished. How different characters deal with what they experience and discover, and the Walking Dead style interpersonal, us-vs-us drama that happens within the overarching us-vs-them plot. Various flavors of torment.
How will your character integrate into the setting? How do you see them dealing with life in Sweetwater? What are your plans for them in this game?

Hap is a peculiar case due to his crimes experiences. At first, he'll see a kinship with the people that have brought him here. He's always wished his own subjects could put themselves aside and understand the importance of his research. He'll have to confront that being that subject he always wanted is impossible, and end up understanding his victims just as much if not more than he does the overseers of Sweetwater. In a really wishy-washy, denial isn't just a river in Egypt kind of way.

Because ultimately he won't be able to play by the rules. He'll stay convinced that he can work and study his way out of this jam, until he's proven wrong beyond a shadow of a doubt. That's going to involve some shady stuff (only with fully OOCly consenting parties) and result in serious punishment, possibly not just from the HOA et al. If any of these many pegs by which he will knocked down result in him becoming a better person, it will only be incrementally. I'm not looking to pull off a redemption arc with him.

Why did you choose this character specifically for this game? Because he could use a taste of his own medicine. Like Sweetwater, Hap's charming exterior masks some real messed up truths and rationalizations. He considers everything he does for the sake of his experiments necessary and impersonal. "All great work comes with great pain," as he puts it. But he's always had the luxury of being the one inflicting that pain, even if he doesn't get any satisfaction out of it except empirical data. Time for him to see how the other half lives.
What are your favorite elements of horror? Psychological, character-driven horror, power imbalance and reversal. Desperate situations and survival, voluntary sacrifice. Corruption and coercion. I love writing body horror and physical trauma. I really enjoy settings like Silent Spring where something dark's going on under the idyllic facade (including literally; love a good escape-the-murder-basement scenario). Horror and thrillers deeply entrenched in their historical setting (like Overlord, Ravenous and Errementari).
Do you understand that Silent Spring's purpose is horror, not domesticity/found family, and that the following themes (nuclear panic, the Red Scare, conformism, sexism and restrictive gender roles, heteronormativity/gender binarism, surveillance, gaslighting, brainwashing/propaganda, disinformation, pollution/contamination, poisoning, loss of control, smoking, alcohol culture, and uncanny valley) cannot be opted out of? Yes.
Do you agree to accept the potential IC consequences (social shunning/ostracism, potential exclusion from neighborhood social events, up to brainwashing, sleep deprivation torture, and nonconsensual haloperidol injection) in full for your character's actions in game? Yes.
Do you agree to accept the most severe IC consequences (physical torture, excluding eye, nail, dental, or toe/finger trauma) for serious IC crimes beyond subversion (ex: attacking or killing an NPC, killing a PC, attempting a bank robbery...) or to abstain from having your character commit serious crimes in this setting? Big yes.
Do you understand that this is a horrorgame, that some elements may be disturbing to you personally, and that you and only you are responsible for making sure that you don't engage with properly warned content that upsets you? Yes.

Housing Preferences

What is your usual tagging speed? Tagging patterns? Medium to slow. I try to tag a thread at least once a day but there are occasional 2-4 day lulls. More available and likely to boomerang on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, and always faster on short form threads (network, commentspam, etc).
What activity level is ideal to you in a partner? I'll really roll with anything as long as it's not holding up anyone's AC.
What is your timezone? How important is it that the other players in the household be in a similar timezone? PST. 7 out of 10 important?
Would you like a household with a child, without, or do you have no preference? No preference, though fair warning that Hap would be, at best, a domineering, emotionally abusive father.
Are you okay with being placed with a character/character(s) that would impact your character's reputation? Yes.