What's your Incarnate Item?

Succubus Kali doesn't have any sort of Incarnate item. If there absolutely must be something, then it would probably be the Hellfire that surrounds her body.

Major Decoy is easy, being science. Anything sufficiently analyzed can be utilized by science. The incarnate shards yield interesting results in lab, they've found a mixture that provides some extra resilience, improved stamina, and, unexpectedly, the distance at which he's able to engage the enemy. Dr. Stephanie Rodgers is still trying to figure that one out.

I just reviewed the story arc and the artifact you retrieve from Trapdoor evaporates in a poof when you get your first incarnate shard, so there isn't really any reason to come up with an incarnate artifact!

For my main, it's a locket that belonged to their mother. It holds pictures of two men, one dark and one fair, who otherwise bear a striking resemblance to one another. Like all of their other possessions, it disappeared during the century they spent trapped in a caved-in section of Oranbega. Somehow, Trapdoor stumbled across it, and now they have it back.

Aside from their powers, the pictures are the only link they have to their fathers.

My only characters who have an actual Incarnate connection IC are my immortal Efranof and the demonicly possessed Lord Darvek.

Efranof's is his katana, originally made with his blood folded into the steel it had a connection to him and never breaks or needs to be sharpened, the sword will 'die' only when Efranof does. He is meant to be an incarnate of fear and to a lesser extent doubt.

The demon 'Lord Darvek' has been eternally bound to possess the males in the Darvek family tree, a curse to both the humans and the demon. Since the demon is the only one with power and possesses the most recent Darvek, it's Incarnate item is the host himself, their body and soul which it owns and is also a slave to. Together they are meant to be an incarnate of deceit, manipulation, lies and imbalance.

Too bad we cant really choose an incarnate item.

I did the arc twice on the same character, because I was a villain at the time. It becomes a little bit of a larger story. Get ready for a wall of text.

It started when we got the free server transfers. I moved my illusion/rad character which was a clone of my illusion/empathy character to Freedom, while my illusion/empathy was hopping between servers. My characters perceived the whole thing as alternate-universe hopping, and I ended up with two of the "same" character, but with different backstories, on the same server.

Enter Issue 16 and the dopplegangers, in particular the storyline heroside where I meet a doppleganger and it ends up sacrificing itself. This was such a good match for the duplicate character I had from the server transfers, that I had that character die for real (deleted him); but not before trying to find someone who was very important for him in the other universe (server) and who got universe-displaced with him, a girl named Joy (Fortunata Joy being the name of a pet of an in-game friend who had just found out she had cancer, and no longer plays). At this point, my character is a pure hero, but promises to look for her.

And here comes Going Rogue, and my character finds out that the girl he's looking for landed in the Rogue Isles, and somehow ended up at Westin Phipps' haven looking for refuge. She has latent psychic powers, so Phipps arranged to have her undergo Fortunata training. What to do? Infiltrate Arachnos and free her, of course. Via the tip missions, my character starts soiling his own reputation in order to gain enough reputation as a fallen hero that he could have a shot at entering Grandville and gain a patron. The villanous deeds took a toll on him, but it was all just an act, so it was fine... right?

When he completes the switch to villain, he takes Ghost Widow as a patron and starts looking around the Fortunatas to find Joy. However, there's not a trace of her. Weeks pass, and the atmosphere of Grandville and having to keep doing villanous deeds in order to keep the facade is really messing my character up; but finally, hacking into Weaver One's mainframe, she finds her -- as a candidate for the Tarantula program. Her body's been broken, put an exoskeleton, and turned into a Toxic Tarantula.

Enraged, my character breaks into a Weaver cell and frees the Tarantula, whose brain has been badly scrambled. Exploiting the Patron program, he trains in Mace Mastery in order to keep her as his 'pet'. But he knows that Paragon City would not accept a Toxic Tarantula in his borders, and he's now very angry, so he goes in a Roaring Rampage of Revenge while trying to reverse the damage to her mind, at which point he does his most villanous acts.

This is when the Incarnate arc comes in. During his talks with the Well, my character just wanted more power in order to crush Arachnos and restore Joy's mind. But when he gazed into the Incarnate artifact, it turned into a hologram, a vision, of what the future held: Grandville destroyed, victorious over a dead Lord Recluse; but also Faultline [his home] destroyed, over Fusionette's body [my character actually LIKES Fusionette and the Faultline crew]; Atlas Park destroyed; the entire world burning under a new tyrant's fist.

That vision haunted his mind and his dreams, even after the artifact went 'poof' at the end of the arc. That's when he knew he couldn't keep doing that; he had to make amends and go back to the light. Rather than trying to find the solution for Joy's broken mind in Arachnos, he just started doing heroic deeds again, and taking her along. At first, after seeing nothing but destruction from him, Tarantula Joy was very confused; but over time, slowly, the heroic deeds started to make an impression on her. Eventually, my character turned all the way back into a hero, and was to get back his hero ID -- even though most of the other heroes were quite weirded out by the Toxic Tarantula, still wearing Arachnos' emblem, accompanying him.

And that's when I did the Incarnate arc again in the blue Ouroboros. Mender Ramiel explained that due to the effects of some temporal mucking-about, I had to travel in time and do basically the same thing again in order to correct the timeline.

This time, when my character got the Incarnate artifact and glanced into it, it still turned into a hologram -- kids playing with Back Alley Brawler in Gemini Park; Atlas Park full of new heroes keeping the city safe; Fusionette and Penny Yin eating Donuts in Faultline's shop; and Tarantula Joy getting her new quarters in the supergroup base of Power of Illusion, the weirdest member of the team for sure, but a hero nonetheless.

***

Leo, did you Critically hit the Submit Reply button?

That's quite the double post.

My first hero to do it, a certain Green Taipan (who is more of a mix of Spider-Man and Nightwing than anything) has his item being his own genetics. Being a mutant who was first mutated when bitten by an Australian Taipan snake (one of the world's most venomous), he had to have his powers stabilised by....dum-dum-DUmmmmmm...

TREATMENT X! /echo

...which also gave him some reptilian facial characteristics. Now that he's been exposed to the Well's strange energies, he's mutating...again. His reptile features are gone and he's becoming...well, heck, I dunno....


S.

Well For Desi Nova, I guess it would be her Gloves, which were always the source of her power, but now she's gaining even more control over the nanobots that are in the gloves. Now she needs to concentrate less to control them (lower end cost) and has better aim at long distances (Longer range) and soon™ there will be even more...

For napalm firestorm (my fire/sr scrapper) it's his cigar.

Spectreblade's Incarnate item would be his sword. Up until now, all his powers have come from the possessed suit of armor he wears, which was part of a collection he inherited. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine that the armor wasn't the only enchanted artifact in the collection, and in fact there have been many instances where would-be villains have tried to steal from the collection hoping to find an artifact to empower themselves with. And one sword from the collection just happened to be a link to the Well.

I'd tell you, but this is a family-friendly forum.

As to the "poof", the text says that it "evaporates into thin air". While that means it's no longer physically present at the time, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's gone for good; it depends on how you choose to roleplay it. For Balanced, I choose to play it as the locket moving on to its next part in their destiny; it is likely now in the hands of one of their fathers, reminding him of the past, but Balanced is still connected to it.

Great thread, Marcian!


For my Rad/Rad Defender and Fire/Rad Corruptor pair (the Corruptor is his, until recently, sadistic, psychopathic Praetorian twin), their "Item" is similar to the idea behind the Invention system. In my head, it is something along the lines of a "Technomancy Converter," which can assimilate magic-based abilities and devise a viable technology counterpart. I loathe magic, and my characters reflect that; a la Lex Luthor in JLU, "...too chaotic."

Both of them are Incarnates of Hephaestus, and thus their smithing and crafting, and sheer intellect, are slowly increasing.

Most of my other toons are empowered by the Defender (his company specializes in bringing out the latent or weak abilities of mutants/naturals via technology), so they will necessarily be "upgraded."

Technomancy Converter - Beating Magic, one invention at a time.

Hell

I think what happens to the artifact is influenced by your origin. For instance, my magic character recently did the arc and it solidified into a magical symbol. I don't remember any poofing.