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Roleplay / Re Incarnation Quest

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[X] Who are you and why am I in your body?

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Bring it oooooooonnnnn

Started on December 31st, 2016 by Sufficient Velocity user Anonymous Rabbit, Re:Incarnation Quest puts the players into the mind of Marcus, a 21 year old Vanilla Protagonist (though he doesn't stay that way for long) thrust out of our world by a speeding car and into another world where he finds himself occupying the body of an elven girl who had just sacrificed herself in an attempt to awaken the ancient god of her forest to defend it.

The first problem is that the spirit of that very same elven girl is hovering a few feet away and is royally pissed at him for inadvertently possessing her body and possibly screwing up the ritual she just performed (she was supposed to die for it, and by taking her place, he brought her body back to health).The second problem is that Marcus is now stuck here, and the Elf—whose name is soon discovered to be Sahatri—is stuck with him.

From these beginnings unfolds a wild tale of champions, secrets, conspiracies, wars, and dance battling. Marcus reincarnates (per the quest name) each time he dies into a new body at the moment of his demise, taking on their form while their spirit is added to those following him around. The spirits lend aid in battle, both with magical powers of their own and powerful 'Synchronization' spells when their will and Marcus' will are aligned, allowing them to collectively unleash devastating abilities. Marcus is implied not to be the only reincarnating being in the world, though, and for all the successes the thread has accomplished, the story is still nowhere near finished.

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This Work is quite Extensive and Contains Multiple Arcs. To avoid Confusion, Examples have been sorted by which Incarnation they appear in.

    Examples Spanning Multiple Incarnations 
  • Back from the Dead: While the Main Character Marcus is the most obvious one initially, other characters are known to Recur across incarnations such as Kifa.
  • Back-to-Back Badasses: Marcus and Sahatri when using Sahatri's 'Unbreakable Vows' Synchronization
  • Blessed with Suck: Re:Incarnation means that you technically can't die outside of certain circumstances but each reincarnation pushes some poor girl out of her body to make room for Marcus. Worse still, as Mathilda demonstrates near the end of Elia's arc, reincarnating too many times and acquiring too-large a following of spirits can cause them to collectively start losing power and eventually be forced to merge into a barely-sane Hive Mind
  • The Corruption: The blight, poor Forte
  • Cosmic Retcon: Marcus' Plot Lives effectively work as these, allowing her to rewind a death or other negative event into an alternate timeline in an attempt to prevent it from recurring. Doing so is not without cost however.
  • Clothes Make the Superman: Downplayed, nearly all armor sets acquired by Marcus convey skills of some sort, some of them lean into Embarrassing but Empowering Outfit territory. Downplayed even further as of the Iza arc wherein Marcus has stuck with a single outfit (and eventually it's upgraded version) from the very start.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Just about everyone, but particularly notable are Marcus, Sahatri, and Jack.
  • Downer Ending: Bad Ends are a thing and Anonymous Rabbit rarely pulls his punches when pointing out how much the players failed and fucked up.
  • Earn Your Bad Ending: Picking the true path - while it may not be guaranteed to result in this - is certainly making this possible...
  • Fantasy Kitchen Sink: And getting all the more so by the update.
  • Flash Step: Marcus' 'Burst' ability while synchronized with Sahatri allows her to teleport like this, disappearing and reappearing in flurries of leaves.
  • Gender Bender: Marcus continuously reincarnates into women so far, despite apparently having been male before all this started.
  • Little Bit Beastly: The Erheni.
  • Medieval Stasis: Zig-Zagged, while guns exist in the setting, magic and various powers seem to have kept warfare from evolving entirely past swords and spears but as the players have seen, the timeskips between reincarnations do result in changing technologies and advancement.
  • Meaningful Echo: "I know, somehow... deep inside... That you're someone who's destined to do many great things... Kifa in several of her first meetings with Marcus
  • Mood Whiplash: Given Rabbit's penchant for Teasing Creator, not to mention the personalities of the spirits, the story can go from 'Lighthearted Training Montage' to 'Marcus getting beaten down and a thread favorite character being kidnapped' in a matter of posts.
    • In-Universe example when the players chose to override the Good Ending they had earned for the Elia arc in favor of carrying on down Mathilda's path...
    • Meta-Examples can also result from the nature of the combat system, where a round of unmitigated successes can be followed up by a round of absolute disasters in the very next post if the dice decide to be fickle.
  • Named Weapons: Between the various referential weapons available in the shops and the weapons earned by the playerbase through omakes Marcus has acquired nearly a dozen named weapons of various power levels over the course of the quest, though they also have a habit of getting lost and don't persist from one reincarnation to the next.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Can occur thanks to player votes thanks to Wrong Genre Savvy, Poor Communication Kills, and the good old fashioned Idiot Ball
  • Nightmare Fuel: Use of plot and combat lives are an in-universe example as Marcus is rewound from the point of failure/death and suffers sanity damage from the process.
  • Power Limiter: Anti-Magic brands, and fields can nullify Marcus' connection to her spirit, severing her ability to use her spells, though her skills still seem to work just fine.
  • Selfcest: Any relationship between Marcus and her spirits technically qualifies as this. They are all different facets of the same soul after all. Mathilda's flirting with Marcus is actually closer to this than the spirits relationships with her since she is actually a future alternate version of Marcus rather than a reflection.
  • Schizo Tech: Initially mostly confined to the East, though it has become more widespread as the quest has gone on.
  • Rule of Cool: Many of the fights practically run on this stuff including especially the Synchronization abilities.
  • Teasing Creator
  • The Chosen One: Marcus is not outright chosen in any given arc but thus far circumstances have regularly conspired to make her a crucial figure in each arc, whether it's as a symbol, a warrior, or just as a very specific Spanner in the Works
  • Schmuck Bait: Occasionally a point of some contention as to whether certain voting options actually constitute this, but everyone can agree that one does not ask the mysterious shopkeeper about themself.
  • Titles to Run Away From Really Fast: Most bosses (and even some mooks!) have a frightening title attached to their names.
    • 'The Frozen Gungnir' Arc One Kifa
    • Sleeping Demon King of Seven Heavens
    • King of the Beasts, Soldier of the Slayer of Lords
    • Vessel to Pain and Agony, a Disease of the Soul Aile
    • Destroyer of Hopes and Dreams MUSHROOM MAN
    • Can't forget Marcus Elia-Incarnation title of 'Bloodstained Princess'
  • Walking Spoiler: Certain characters crucial to each arc cannot really be discussed in any depth without spoiling a whole bunch of stuff.
  • Weapons Kitchen Sink: To date Marcus has wielded a massive variety of swords, 'Pummeling Heat Gauntlets', at least one spear, a pistol, a fantasy grenade launcher, and a stun baton, to say nothing of the Transforming Axe-Cannon...

    Sahatri Incarnation (Arc 1) 
  • Alas, Poor Villain: Kifa's death.
  • Beware the Nice Ones: Kifa, when she gets to fighting she gets scary.
  • The Mole: Kifa
  • The Chosen One: Possibly the only case of this happening literally in the quest as Marcus and Sahatri are chosen by Yggdrassil and granted additional power to stop The East's attack on the Elves.

    Elia Incarnation (Arcs 2-5) 

    Iza Incarnation (Arcs 6-?) 
  • After the End: This Incarnation takes place with the world having ended no less than three times in the intervening 14000 years according to Eva.
  • Came Back Wrong: Mixed with Brainwashed and Crazy as Elia and Sahatri have come back as 'Calamities' as part of a gambit to resurrect the ancient lords who ruled the world in the time before time.
  • Gun Fu: Closer to 'Cannon-Fu' with the Switch Cannon weapon.
  • Light Is Not Good: The Calamity of Oaths To be expected since she's using Elia's powerset
  • Nightmare Fuel: The Calamities have this in spades when you think about them for more than a few seconds, especially for Marcus.
    • In-Universe Marcus transformation into a Star-Eater Demon has caused this for herself.
  • Schizo Tech: All over the setting in this incarnation, which mixes all sorts of time periods and inventions.
  • Schmuck Bait: Happens a lot in this incarnation.
  • The Chosen One: While Marcus hasn't specifically been chosen by any particular person, the fact that she still has connections to Sahatri and Elia make her quite possibly the only person in the world capable of stopping the Calamities. Without triggering the Return of the Lords that is.
  • Walking Spoiler: The Calamities, they can't even be discussed as distinct beings without revealing things!
  • Wham Line: "Marcus! She Knows!"
  • Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Apparently a common and frequently succesful tactic of The Calamity of Oaths.
    • Vania has also attempted this against hundreds of Alternate Marcuses, though it didn't work when she ran into the real thing.
  • Yandere: It's difficult to tell if Marina is a true example of this or merely psychotic.

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