Resurrection Teleportation

A character can come back to life elsewhere after dying, and exploits this ability as a means of quickly getting somewhere else. They might have innate Resurrective Immortality, be living in a sci-fi/fantasy setting where they can get transferred to a Body Backup Drive at a Respawn Point or literally revives when they're teleported into a special Pocket Dimension or Another Dimension, for example via a cloning machine which then acts as an impromptu teleporter. This also tends to require that the character's memory be retained after each death, though it could conceivably be done without that being the case.

This can be considered a particularly grisly form of Mundane Utility, and a subtype of the Thanatos Gambit. It might figure into a villain's My Death Is Just the Beginning plot.

On a meta level, video game speedruns can use this as an advantage if killing the player character and getting respawned is faster than travelling to the Respawn Point normally.^note In speedrun terminology, this is called a Death Warp. The Tool-Assisted Speedrun archive TASVideos even has an attribute called "Uses death to save time", used by hundreds of speedruns.

This tends to make death seem more like a minor inconvenience than anything. See also Respawn Point, Death Is a Slap on the Wrist. Destructive Teleportation is something of an inversion, where teleporting from place to place requires killing the original. If something Only Killable at Home isn't completely immortal outside their 'home', this trope will ensure they resurrect at their home, not where they were slain.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Ajin, demi-humans will resurrect themselves using the largest intact piece of their body, regardless of range. Satou cuts off his hand, mails it, then throws himself into a wood chipper so that he can revive himself at another location. He does this despite knowing that this will kill his current consciousness, which is why no one expected him to actually resort to it.
• The protagonist of Akumetsu (really a set of clones) uses this to his advantage throughout the series. He will carry out an assassination, let himself be killed, and then a device in his mask transmits his memories to the next clone body produced in the facility they are "born" from.

Fan Works

• In The Many Deaths of Rainbow Dash, Rainbow respawns somewhere near her corpse every time she dies, and eventually learns that by concentrating hard enough she can control where she reappears. She later uses this to get past some metal bars, and finally to dispose of the main villain via a Tele-Frag.

Films — Live-Action

• Used as a major plot point in Dogma. Because God was in a human body, she was able to be knocked into a coma. Because she was in a coma, she had to be killed to return to Heaven and come back to Earth to stop Bartleby and Loki.
• In Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle the main characters are trapped in a video game and when respawning drop out of the sky similarly to how they entered the game world the first time. Martha sacrifices one of her lives in order to respawn away from a horde of venomous snakes she gets trapped in and hand off the MacGuffin she's carrying to Spencer while traversing the final level, "The Defenders".
• The 6th Day: This is how the Big Bad and his top agents keep getting away despite the hero's attempts to get rid of them.

Literature

• Sergey Lukyanenko's Line of Delirium:
  • Resurrection for humans is commonplace, and the moment anyone dies, that fact instantaneously spreads through the whole universe (Our Souls Are Different) and they can be cloned again immediately in the respawn chamber. Made into a plot point many times:
  • The prime motivation for the main character to work for the Corrupt Corporate Executive is that if he doesn't, he will eventually die and then resurrect in his own private chamber to be tortured to death infinite amount of times.
  • At one point the party is trapped by Silicoids (it's a Master of Orion novelization/fanfiction) - their only way to escape is to kill themselves and respawn, except they can't do that, because the moment they try they'll be reduced to a Brain in a Jar.
  • At another point the party attempts to bypass some sector of space by coming close enough to be under jurisdiction of a respawn point on the other side and then killing themselves so that they will be transported there.
  • It should be noted that these are rare examples, as resurrection is insanely expensive, and few are able to afford it even once without becoming destitute. Even the wealthy don't want to waste their lives in this manner. The only person able to afford that is the owner of the company that makes and maintains the devices, but he never leaves his mansion out of fear of being captured and tortured for information. He wants to send his son to a remote planet on a secret mission, but is afraid of using this trope, as there are plenty of corporate and government spies among his employees.
• Philip José Farmer's Riverworld story "The Suicide Express" revolves around this. When someone dies on the Riverworld, they are resurrected at some point along the river. Characters who want to reach the origin point of the river will repeatedly kill themselves, knowing that they will eventually be resurrected near enough to the origin to walk to it.
• Childe Cycle: In "Necromancer", Paul Formain gets transported to another star system, and is trapped. In order to get back, he breaks open a window, which results in his death. This causes him to reawaken in a new body back on Earth.
• In The Dispatcher, people murdered (usually) disappear only to reappear unharmed in their bed at home. At one point, the mob toss Tony down an elevator shaft so he can leave a meeting with them unobserved.

Live-Action TV

• Battlestar Galactica:
  • The re-imagined Battlestar Galactica has this in spades with the Cylons. Those who die "download" their memories into new (but identical) bodies... provided there is a Resurrection Ship nearby to maintain the link. Cue Cylons killing each other, killing themselves, being denied death, and attempting to suicide out when, unbeknownst to them, no Resurrection Ship is nearby... simply as a convenient means of transportation and escape. Also cue main characters dying and waking up immediately in what they realize, to their horror, is a Cylon resurrection tub. And then waking up for real.
  • Technically, Sharon Agathon pulled this when she had Helo kill her so she would download into a new body on the Cylon ship, where she could rescue her daughter. And yes, it was as awesome and heart-wrenching as it sounds.
• Forever: Whenever Dr. Henry Morgan dies, his body vanishes (including clothing and anything he's directly carrying that he doesn't drop in time) and he immediately reappears in the nearest large body of water (on Manhattan, usually the Hudson or East River). While Henry normally doesn't choose to die if he can help it, in a flashback in "Diamonds Are Forever" we see his cellmate convince him to use suicide as a means of escape. The Older Immortal Adam, on the other hand, makes use of this factor quite casually to escape from the police in "The Last Death of Henry Morgan" by casually slitting his own throat. Adam does the same to Henry as a "favor" in "The Frustrating Thing About Psychopaths" when he's lying helpless with a broken neck, about to be discovered that way by Jo. Unfortunately for Adam, he is unable to use this to escape torture by Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz, as the Nazis quickly figured out he'd reappear in a nearby river and would easily recapture him for more Playing with Syringes.
• In Krypton, Lobo once used this trick to get past a force field. After managing to get his hand through the force field, he shot himself in the head. His severed hand then regenerated into him.
• Lexx did this with season 3's Big Bad Prince. Nobody on the planets Fire or Water died permanently - they'd just wake up again somewhere else. Prince, however, seemed to have some choice about where and when he'd be resurrected (and in what form), which he used to his advantage on a number of occasions. (Prince showed up again on Earth in season 4, but no longer appeared to have this ability).

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition: The Dark Wanderer epic destiny raises Walking the Earth to dimension-spanning levels. At Level 30, if they die, they wake up at a random location twelve hours later, then walk back to the site of their death over the next twelve hours.
• In Eclipse Phase an Emergency Farcaster implant transmits the character's Ego to a resleeving facility elsewhere in the solar system, but in the process fatally overheats their brain (or blows it up, depending on the writer). It's one of the more reliable means for Earth scavengers to get past the blockade.
• Chaosium's Nephilim. When a Nephilim's Simulacrum (human host body) dies, it can search out and occupy another human body a considerable distance away.

Video Games

• This tactic is called "Blood-porting" by MMORPG players. For example, in City of Heroes, where low-level players don't get XP debt when defeated, they'll often allow themselves to be killed as a shortcut out of a dangerous area (like the Hollows, for instance).
• Planescape: Torment: One level is based entirely on abusing your immortality to explore. You check the area, get killed, respawn at the entrance, check another area, repeat until you check everything.
• It's implied that this is how the fast travel works in Borderlands, although that might be a chicken and egg problem (did they use teleportation technology to make New-U stations or New-U stations to make teleporters?).
• The Coop Robots from Portal 2. When they go Off the Rails, the only way GLaDOS can get them back is to wreck their current body.
• A fairly common tactic in EVE Online — just don't forget to update your clone first. It can be the only way out if you end up in a system in unknown space with no probes. "Jump clones" can be installed at stations with medical facilities. You can then "teleport" to that station from any other station. The location you "teleport" from is left with your old body, which becomes a new jump clone. If you try to teleport from a station that already has a jump clone, the other clone will be destroyed.
• Simon the Sorcerer 3D has Simon escaping from a locked room by goading the Barbarian Hero who is also locked in the room into killing him, causing him to respawn on the resurrection tile outside.
• It's quite common in Dungeons & Dragons Online for someone to join your group and immediately die. Using the "/death" command in a tavern will teleport you even to a distant bind point without damaging your equipment, saving a lot of walking time.
• Project Eden has character reappear at their last tagged Regen points when killed, which make it sometime quicker to kill them off than walk somewhere.
• Aggelos warps the player character to the last touched shrine upon death.
• The Tyranid campaign of Dawn of War II: Retribution uses this as in-story justification for teleporting (using a digestion pool as teleporter), because Tyranids don't have teleportariums, webway gates, or tellyportas.
• World of Warcraft
  • Generally requires you to walk back, as a ghostly spirit, from the graveyard you find yourself in to your corpse, averting this trope most of the time. However...
  • You can pay a penalty of gold and temporary ability loss to resurrect directly in the graveyard, possibly saving some travel time or the inconvenience of fighting your way back out from the lair in which you died. This never seemed to catch on much as a means of travel, possibly because graveyard locations could be unpredictable, or because other travel options were more convenient.
  • If you do walk back, you will resurrect where your ghost is standing rather than where your physical corpse was, which only needs to be nearby, not directly under you. This can be a good way to escape after becoming trapped somewhere. It could also be used to bypass an obstacle since ghosts can walk through some objects such as locked doors, which can be considered an exploit.
  • Instanced dungeons will resurrect you as soon as your ghost walks back through the entrance, so this used to be an ideal way to return to the start to turn in quests or similar. It's now possible to leave and re-enter a dungeon so this is no longer necessary most of the time.
  • The ghost realm itself could be viewed as a location only accessible through death, with one infamous quest only given by an NPC found there.
• In a certain climax episode of 2nd arc in I=MGCM, the main universe version of Iroha gets killed by Nemesis Iroha, who has become a Fallen Hero a long time ago. Fortunately, the next episode shows that the main universe Iroha gets revived by being teleported into the White Room by Kamisaman, and her memories are completely intact. Occasionally, though, she's ditzy.
  Iroha (main universe version): Hello? Am I in Heaven...?
  Kamisaman: Hello there.
  Iroha (main universe version): Who are you?
  Kamisaman: (gets angry) NGGGRRRHHH!! IT'S ME, KAMISAMAN!
• The System Shock games have resurrection stations with zero (in the first game) and marginal (in the sequel) penalties. Due to the games' maze-like levels you can sometimes use these as short-cuts by killing yourself. Just make sure you've turned the station on before you try this.

Web Comics

• Something like this happens in the webcomic Star Slip. One of the characters is a clone, who, when he is killed, gets respawned in a cloning bath on their ship (a la the re-imagined Cylons). When the entire crew gets stranded on a planet and their ship hijacked by pirates, their solution to take back the ship is for the clone to die and respawn back on the ship.
• One of the "player" characters uses this trope in Ctrl+Alt+Del. She kills herself to win a race to the flat.

Web Videos

• In Mortal Kombat: Legacy, after finding himself trapped in an insane asylum and therefore unable to get help to fight Shao Khan, Raiden hatches a plan to have Blue kill him so he can resurrect somewhere else.

Western Animation

• South Park:
  • In one Easter episode, Jesus and Kyle are temporarily imprisoned by the Catholic Church. Jesus, who cannot self terminate, as suicide is a sin, has Kyle kill him so he can resurrect outside of the cell and free them. Kyle does so on the condition of secrecy, because if Cartman (an Antisemite) heard Kyle (a Jew) technically killed Jesus, he would never shut up about it.
  • One Coon and Friends episode involves the group (minus Coon) getting transported to an Eldritch Location with seemingly no escape. Mysterion, realizing he always wakes up in his bed after he dies, jumps into a pit of spikes to get back to South Park and find a way to free everyone else. At the end of the Coon and Friends trilogy, he also uses this as a quick way to go to bed when he's tired.
• A variation occurs in Megamind. When Megamind is falling to his doom, he uses his dehydration gun to dehydrate himself. He then manages to land safely in the fountain and rehydrate himself without any harm.

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