Grail in the Garbage



It's an artifact of earth-shaking power. Its value is immeasurable, its history is the stuff of legends. It's.... being offered at a clearance price at the local discount store.

Sometimes, priceless things can be found in the most unlikely places. Maybe the previous owner didn't realize what he had, maybe some higher power put it there for a reason, maybe it's just one of those unique chance encounters. For whatever reason, it's being treated as far less valuable than it really is, and it's ripe for the picking by an unsuspecting hero. If this sort of thing is actually the bread and butter of the place in question, then it's a Bazaar of the Bizarre or The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday.

Compare It May Help You on Your Quest, Worthless Yellow Rocks, Priceless Paperweight, Excalibur in the Rust, and Commonplace Rare.

Anime and Manga

 * Chii, in Chobits, is found in a dumpster.
 * Saito's talking sword in The Familiar of Zero was sold for dirt cheap in a weapon shop. Since Derflinger is actually the traditional weapon/partner of the Gandalfr, karma almost certainly arranged for him to be in the shop solely to end up in Saito's hands. In fact, Derflinger looks pretty crappy and likely handles poorly in the hands of anyone but Gandalfr. It's a good bet everyone else thought it was worthless junk.
 * In Ressentiment, the game containing the original AI girl of which all others are simplified copies is found lying under a rack of disks in an ordinary game shop.
 * In One Piece, one of Zoro's swords, which is cursed, but immensely powerful if it can be controlled, was found in the armory equivalent of a bargain bin, precisely because it was cursed.
 * The rare medal used by Metabee in Medabots was originally found by the riverbank. The first episode opens with the Phantom Renegade stealing the medal and evading the Rubberrobos, then accidentally dropping it into the river.
 * In the beginning of Magical Stage Fancy Lala, Miho first finds Pigu and Mogu at a toy store when they attach themselves to her book bag. The mysterious man who pops up throughout the series pays for them because the store clerk thinks she's stealing them.
 * In Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's, Godwin had three of the cards for the eponymous 5 Dragons, and quietly released them to the public to let destiny take its course. We don't know how Aki wound up with the Black Rose Dragon card, but Yusei and Jack probably would have found Stardust Dragon and Red Dragon Archfiend, respectively, in the trash as the two lived in the Satellite slums and had to assemble their decks from discarded cards. Possible aversion in that the cards wouldn't be particularly special to anyone who doesn't have a Sign of the Crimson Dragon.
 * We see that Aki is given her Plant-based deck as a birthday present by her father. Besides the more often used effect, Black Rose Dragon also has an effect which works in tandem with Plants, so it seems likely that she got it then. Yusei and Jack probably gained their dragons during their 'Team Satisfaction' days, where they engaged in card-based turf wars until they had beaten everybody in Satellite. The dragons were perhaps taken as prizes?
 * Death Note. Guy finds the Artifact of Doom on the ground in front of his school? Of course, in this case, it was deliberately dropped in the hope someone "interesting" would find it.
 * In Soukou no Strain, Sara finds a discarded doll in the scrapyard area of a ship while looking for a pendant someone stole from her locker. The doll is pretty dirty and seemingly abandoned, and when Sara sees EMLY imprinted on the back of the doll, she gives her the name Emily, and grows attached to the doll. Emily also allows her to control a Strain, a mecha that needs a specialized MacGuffin in order to activate (Sara's was destroyed in the first episode, so she was unable to control one again until this point).

Comic Books

 * Happens at the end of the second Cerebus book, High Society, where it turns out the priceless bird statue that Cerebus could have used earlier to unite the Church factions was given to him with a bunch of other random trash from a hobo who seemed to have Cerebus confused with someone else about a third of the way through the book.
 * Seen in a Witchblade spinoff, in which a medieval woman warrior (don't ask about the plausibility) discovers the Witchblade while shoveling manure.
 * In the Tintin book The Secret of the Unicorn, Tintin buys a model ship from a street vendor to give to Captain Haddock as a gift. It turns out the ship has a scroll concealed in the mast which, when combined with two others from identical ships, leads to a fortune in gold and jewels.
 * Double Subversion in Archie Comics. Jughead finds an old violin in the trash bin outside the pawnshop. When a suspicious man tries to steal it from him, Archie believes that it's a Stradivarius violin. He and Jughead head off to a music shop to get it appraised, only to learn that the violin is no Stradivarius, just a complete piece of junk.

Film

 * Woody in Toy Story 2: Al discovers him in a yard sale and rejoices that he's finally found his Holy Grail, as he's been collecting a full set to restore and sell to a museum.
 * Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders is the embodiment of this trope, and it even gets more trope-y when the Lord of Evil is in the form of a monkey cymbalist that's stolen and sold to a ratty toy shop.
 * Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors mysteriously appears in a plant vendor's inventory.
 * In The Forbidden Kingdom, the golden staff of the legendary Monkey King is found in a Chinatown pawn shop specializing in Wuxia DVD's.

Literature

 * David in Animorphs was about to sell the morphing cube online before the Animorphs caught wind of it. Worse, he was about to unwittingly sell it to Visser Three, probably for way, way less than it would have been worth even if the Visser didn't intend on infesting David the moment he sold it.
 * Robert Louis Stevenson's short story "The Bottle Imp": A bottle that can grant wishes has a price of only $80 because it can only be sold for less than its previous sale price. Why would someone want to sell such a bottle? Because if a person dies while owning it, his soul automatically goes to Hell.
 * The Lord of the Rings.
 * In The Hobbit (written first), Bilbo finds the One Ring on the ground, after Gollum misplaced it. (As the narration says, " It was a turning point in his career, but he did not know it. He put the ring in his pocket almost without thinking; certainly it did not seem of any particular use at the moment.") So you have an ordinary ring owned by some deformed hobbit. Then Bilbo discovers it can make the wearer invisible.
 * Then in The Lord of the Rings, we discover that Gollum's friend first found the ring many years ago just lying at the bottom of a river. So it seems like Bilbo has an "ordinary" ring of invisibility-until we learn it is far more than that.
 * Also in The Hobbit, Bilbo and the dwarves find Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver and Glamdring the Foe Hammer in the trolls' lair, amidst the bones of their victims. These powerful swords are elven blades forged in Gondolin during the First Age. How the trolls got them is unknown, but Elrond suggests the trolls plundered other plunderers.
 * To a lesser extent, the small dagger Bilbo also finds in the trolls' lair. He doesn't think much of it at the time; it's a useful blade to someone his size, but doesn't seem to be anything else. As it turns out, it's also an elven blade forged in Gondolin. He later calls it "Sting".
 * Gandalf thinks that Bilbo doesn't know the true value of the Mithril mail shirt that Thorin give him, and that he left it as a mathom in the Shire. The truth is that Bilbo really knows its true value and gave it to Frodo.
 * The eponymous book in The Neverending Story, found in (or rather, stolen from) an unsuccessful antique bookstore.
 * "Chivalry", a short story by Neil Gaiman, features an old woman who buys the Holy Grail in a secondhand shop. She has a bunch of items like this and uses them to decorate her house. After she buys it, Sir Galahad of the Round Table stops by and offers her such gifts as the Philosophers' Stone and an apple of the Hesperides and a phoenix egg in return for giving up the Grail, she goes gives it to him and goes to the store a second time. She considers, for a moment, buying what is heavily implied to be the lamp from the tale of Aladdin... before realizing she has nowhere left to put it.
 * Abdullah of Castle in the Air buys a plot-important flying carpet from a tattered, dirty traveling carpet salesman.
 * In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry helps Sirius throw out all of his family's relics that he doesn't want. Among them is an old locket that no one is aware
 * And again in Half-Blood Prince, Harry hides the Prince's potions book in a room where lots of other students (and teachers!) have hidden things they didn't want found over the years. One such item, which Harry uses to mark the place where he hid the book, is
 * Mirroring The Lord of the Rings, the eponymous Sword of Shannara is found in the last place you'd expect it—in a bunch of junk that a looter picked up off a battlefield. Despite every legend about it saying it was embedded in a block of "Tre-stone" in the druids' castle. Subverted, though, when the looter knows that the battered, cheap sword with the gold paint peeling off it is the most valuable weapon in the world, even though the heroes don't, and refuses to let go of it.
 * In The Serpent's Egg trilogy, Typhoon gives a busted up crown to Penelope as a reward for watching a very much alive and ready to hatch dragon egg, which she was told was a rock. It was far bigger than her. Notably, she tried to steal from Typhoon earlier, and had to clean his entire hoard with a bowl of... spittle. Which was pretty stupid, seeing as he literally saved their lives from a damn army before that.
 * In Oathbreakers, Kethry happens to find a useless-looking dull-bladed old sword abandoned in a cabin in the mountains; she and Tarma speculate that it must have been a decorative sword and the gems and gilding were all stripped off by previous travelers, leaving behind what was left as junk. Kethry, on an impulse, takes it along when they leave, and it turns out to be the ancestral Sword that Sings, traditionally used to choose the proper ruler of the country of Rethwellan.
 * In L. Jagi Lamplighter's Prospero Lost, Miranda finds a chameleon cloak in a second-hand store. Both its presence and her discovery get explained later.
 * Atlas Shrugged has an Anvilicious example, where Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden discover a power generator an order of magnitude more advanced than any invented before, abandoned and decayed in the gutted ruins of the Twentieth Century Motor Company, because everybody who could have taken it had ceased to value the products of the human mind.
 * Janet and Isaac Asimov's Norby series begins when young Jeff Wells buys Norby, a battered, apparently malfunctioning robot that the proprietor doesn't even think is worth selling. Said robot turns out to be a completely sentient alien artifact capable of antigravity, telepathy, FTL transportation, and time travel.
 * The time-travelling Glass in Septimus Heap is found in a warehouse where everything else is random junk like sheep bones.

Live-Action TV

 * In The Tenth Kingdom, a magic mirror that will allow the heroes to go back to their own world is for sale dirt cheap, as no one knows what it is. When its true nature is discovered, however?
 * This is more or less the premise of Warehouse 13 - it's essentially a Grail In The Garbage of the Week show. Your mileage may vary as to whether the eponymous warehouse itself qualifies as an "unlikely place."
 * As a show starring an antiques dealing rogue, Lovejoy often featured this without the supernatural aspect. In one example a church is facing financial ruin, none of the fittings are suitable to raise anything like the money required and as they resign themselves to failure the priest stops to feed his dogs. Cue the priceless antique he uses as a dog bowl
 * Antique shows like the Antiques Roadshow and their international versions are the real-life versions of this trope, in the Dutch show, Tussen Kunst en Kitsch one expert even jokingly said to a person who bought a piece worth 3000€ for 2 BEF (0.05€) at a flea market: I thought this was a fun show, this is just depressing.
 * Pawn Stars often have customers selling artifacts they found in their attic or at a yard sale, making the owner Rick Harrison wonder why he can never find something like that in a yard sale.
 * Cash in the Attic. Some of the stuff sells for less than expected, but sometimes truly rare and valuable items are found.
 * In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, an orb that can restore people's souls is sold as a paperweight.
 * For that matter, Giles once bought a magical talisman from a sorcerer, convinced it was a knock-off. Not only is it real, it's used as part of an apocalyptic ritual.
 * A recurring sketch on That Mitchell and Webb Look involves a seller at a garage sale casually selling incredibly valuable artifacts for a low price. The Holy Grail itself, for instance, was sold for five pounds, as having already gained eternal life from drinking it, he sees no reason to keep it around. And later, the wardrobe that's the entrance to Narnia, as now that he has a garden at his new house, he doesn't really need the extra space.
 * Reality shows like Auction Hunters and Storage Wars have these found in abandoned storage units, when the owner couldn't keep up with the fees.
 * One episode of Stargate SG-1 featured a random guy buying an Ancient communication device at a yard sale.
 * Unlike a lot of these things, this is actually justified in-universe. Unless you have the right (fairly rare) genetics, it's functionally equivalent to a glass paperweight. It does happen that the guy DOES have the right genetics, though...
 * The Big Bang Theory: The geeks go to a yard sale and buy a box of grab bag items. One item turns out to be a missing prop from the Lord Of The Rings movie - The One Ring (well, one of three copies of the One Ring used in the film). Hilarity ensues as they all struggle to possess this 'precious'.
 * In one Malcolm in the Middle Cold Open, Reese accidentally breaks a cheap painting's frame. Before he glues the painting back down, he gets the chance to laugh at the name of the artist who painted the one framed beneath it: "Pic-ass-o".
 * An episode of Modern Marvels about garbage reclamation showed a box of seemingly ordinary gray dust; then we're told that it's over $1000 worth of platinum.
 * In an episode of Power Rangers SPD, Piggy (a scrounger and Knowledge Broker for both the good guys and bad guys) is scrounging around the trash dump as he always does, and finds a winning lottery ticket worth $10 million! He uses the money to open his own business, hoping it will help him stop having to work as a scrounger and knowledge broker.

Periodicals

 * One of the illustrations on the back of a Reader's Digest, entitled "Treasure Hunt", had a man at a garage sale looking at a bust of Lincoln. If you look closely, you can see a copy of Action Comics #1 sitting in a box of old newspapers.

Video Games

 * Invoked constantly in The Darkness II, with Jackie collecting various incredibly powerful and amazingly rare religious artifacts just laying around New York. Sometimes justified by the fact that he is fighting an old cult that has dedicated themselves to controlling The Darkness, and would have collected these artifacts. Other times....why are the ashes of Cain hidden in a New York Cemetery? Why is the seashell containing God's own words lying on the subway floor? Why is a sword forged from two of the angels of death in a mob warehouse? And why is the device for capturing and controlling the Angelus located inside The Darkness itself?
 * Charade's Backstory in Soul Calibur says he bought shards of the Artifact of Doom Soul Edge from a random merchant.
 * In Icewind Dale, the best longsword in the game, Pale Justice, is found on the corpse of a hapless adventurer in Dorn's Deep. What's more is that its inventory icon is the same as any regular longsword (by the time you're using +3/+ 4 weapons) and shopkeepers will buy or sell it for a pittance.
 * Can be done deliberately in Evil Genius. You just stole the Ark of the Covenant? Eh, put it in the break room.
 * In Fable II, Murgo the merchant has the MacGuffin...he actually knows it's magic, but he has no idea what it can actually do. It is revealed in a DLC that it was given to him by your mentor,, which set the whole plot in motion.
 * In the Touhou printed side-story, Curiosities of Lotus Asia, one chapter revolved around Marisa asking Rinnosuke to reinforce her Mini-Hakkero with some of the rare Hihi'irokane/Crimson Ore he had some of so that it would never rust. In exchange, Rinnosuke asked for... the pile of scrap iron that Marisa obsessively collects for no reason. Why did he want Marisa's pile of junk?.
 * In Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, Barkley at one point visits Spalding Building, where he can find a character's Infinity+1 Sword in one of the trash cans. He also lampshades it when he finds a powerful healing item in another can: "It's B-Ball Juice! Who the hell throws B-Ball Juice away?"
 * In Dragon Age, Far Song, generally considered one of if not the best bow in the game, has apparently spent decades sitting buried in the stockroom of a tiny podunk blacksmith shop in Redcliffe.
 * Most Pokémon games have the Leftovers, one of the most useful held items in the series, hidden in a trash can.
 * Somewhat justified in-universe. It is just a small pile of half-eaten food...that just so happens to be able to be able to regenerate itself, giving the Pokémon an infinite supply of free health.
 * In [Borderlands]], you can sometimes find a really good gun when you open up a garbage can.
 * Team Fortress 2 has a heavily hat-based in-game economy between the players, where some virtual hats can cost several hundreds of real life dollars. This also means that there are varying degrees of currency, including using other expensive hats as a large denomination of metal (the primary currency) to free up spaces in one's backpack. One of the common things newbies do is to trade away a pair of earbuds or a Bill's Hat for a bunch of weapons. Both are promotional items that seem worthless, but on the hat market are worth 40 and 20 real life money (or 40 and 20 in-game refined metal). By comparison, any given weapon in the game is worth 1/18th of a buck (18 weapons to make 1 refined metal).
 * Happens often in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, not only because the involved items do seem unimportant, but also because Link is actually unable to carry them on his own. And very fittingly, the player doesn't happen to suspect about these items until Fi's dowsing ability indicates that they're important indeed:
 * In the sacred spring behind Skyview Temple, there are several waterfalls adorning the place.
 * During the search for the Key fragments through Eldin Volcano to open the Earth Temple, Link gets past a seemingly out-of-place metallic pinwheel in a crag that houses a watchtower.
 * Also in Eldin Volcano, there is a crystal ball that adorns the entrance to the Earth Temple.
 * In Lanayru Desert, there is a color wheel in a hill southeast.
 * Character-based example: The seemingly mute dinosaur in Star Fox Adventures, located next to the underground caverns south of Thorntail Hollow is
 * In Dead Island, the vendors will sometimes sell white, common weapons, which have much, much better stats than the rarer, colored weapons. For instance, you could see them selling a blue colored machete which does 500 damage, then the white colored machete right below it does 650 damage...

Web Comics

 * In How I Killed Your Master, Liu Wong pulls the governor's seal - which will grant its bearer a claim to rule the region - out of a random well when he goes to get a drink.

Web Original

 * The Angry Video Game Nerd acquired a copy of the gold cover Nintendo World Championship, the absolutely rarest game in the world in a sale where the previous owner bundled it in with other other much more common games. The bundle contained two copies of the game, the other being a much more common reproduction.
 * Some of the artifacts held by the SCP Foundation were discovered in this manner.

Western Animation
"Roger: It turns you invisible in the middle of nowhere? What good is that? Where were you when I farted at Danny's wedding?"
 * In one episode of The Real Ghostbusters, Ray finds himself in possession of the shears belonging to the Three Fates, finding them on the ground just as he needs to cut something. He keeps them, forcing Clotho to chase him all over New York to try to (discreetly) get them back, because she's the one who dropped them in the first place. As far as he can tell, they're just a pair of scissors, but they're really awesome scissors.
 * American Dad: In "Return of the Bling", Roger finds what is apparently the One Ring near the site of a plane crash...and then promptly throws it away.


 * The Simpsons: "Homer's Barbershop Quartet" begins at a swap meet, in which Homer finds a treasure trove of such items. He dismisses them all: "Junk, junk, the airplane's upside down, Strad-di-who-vious?!..."
 * There's another episode where Moe sells Marge a dusty bottle of wine he has lying under his counter, only to find out that its one of the last of its kind, and insanely valuable. He then proceeds to wipe his tears on the last copy of the lost Shakespeare play.
 * In another episode, Martin's mother tries selling some random stuff she found in his room to Comic Book Guy. Said "stuff" being the original handwritten script for Star Wars, "Princess Leia's anti-jiggle breast tape" and a film reel labeled "Alternate ending -- Luke's father is Chewbacca". CBG tries to scam her by offering 5 dollars only for Bart and Milhouse to inform her that it's worth thousands. Mrs. Prince replies "Well! If this is valuable, then back to the leaky basement it goes!"
 * Earthworm Jim does something similar to the above, with a literal Holy Grail included in the treasures.
 * The Venture Brothers: Dr. Venture and Billy Quizboy find the ORB, an artifact which might have devastating consequences just sitting out in the open.
 * Subverted in another episode, when Monarch Henchmen #21 and #24 find what seems to be a working lightsaber at the Venture Compound garage sale, and use it to challenge Brock Samson. Unfortunately, it's just a prototype and doesn't actually work, which they'd have known if they hadn't been too busy geeking out to listen to Rusty when they bought it. Fortunately, Brock was too busy and/or bemused to actually kill them over it.
 * In Megas XLR, the eponymous Humongous Mecha is left in a scrapyard for several years, before Coop buys it for a few bucks. Which he never pays.
 * In Rocky and Bullwinkle the kerwood derby, a hat that makes you absurdly smart, is found in a store.
 * Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
 * In the episode "The Ninja Sword of Nowhere" from the 1987 series, the eponymous sword is a powerful weapon made of Unobtainium that can cleave through dimensional boundaries. The Turtles find it among the inventory of a pawn shop.
 * In an episode of the 2003 series, Donatello meets an artist named Kirby (an obvious Homage to Jack Kirby) who can bring anything he draws to life due to a magical gemstone on his pen, which he claims he found in a pile of coal.

Real Life

 * It happens in real life more than you think. More often than not, the people who sell at yard sales or flea markets generally don't have that much of an idea on how valuable the junk they're selling is.
 * 5 Pieces of Junk That Turned Out To Be Invaluable Artifacts, via Cracked.com
 * The Passion of Joan of Arc, one of cinema's greatest classics, was thought to have been lost until a nearly perfect print turned up in the closet of an insane asylum.
 * Oskar Schindler's list of names (the real one) was found in an attic in the late 1980s.
 * The winning $200,000 game-piece for a 1995 Wendy's contest was found on a discarded fries container by garbage man Craig Randall.
 * A Tennessee man visiting a museum gift shop wound up buying a copy of the Declaration of Independence as a souvenir, but after noticing it didn't seem all too fresh, he had it appraised. It turned out to be an original draft, one of the few in existence, worth almost as much as the genuine document.
 * One of the lost episodes of early Doctor Who was found in a church basement.