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{{trope}}
[[File:
{{quote|''"Where does a wise man hide a pebble?"''
''And the tall man answered in a low voice: "On the beach."''
|'''[[G. K. Chesterton]]'''}}
They say the best place to hide something is [[Hidden in Plain Sight|in plain sight]]. But suppose that logic won't work-- [[MacGuffin|the object]] you're trying to hide happens to be something that would stand out no matter where you put it. How do you hide such a thing?
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{{examples}}
▲== [[Anime]] & [[Manga]] ==
* At the end of ''[[Spirited Away]]'', Chihiro must figure out which two pigs out of a group of them are her parents. {{spoiler|Her parents aren't there at all, because they're not really pigs to Chihiro. She wins simply by pointing this out.}}
* In ''[[Pokémon]]'', Team Rocket does this in order to steal a Togepi egg.
* Used by Jasdero and Devit in ''[[D.Gray-man]]'' while they were screwing with the exorcists on the Ark. During the initial fight, they dropped the key to the door leading deeper in- so Jasdevi materialized enough keys to cover the entire floor of the room. {{spoiler|However, Lavi has a [[Photographic Memory]] and eventually picked it out by the patterns of wear.}}
* This very phrase is uttered by Lust in the dub of the ''[[Fullmetal Alchemist]]'' anime. In particular, she mentions it when she and Gluttony are looking for Dr. Marcoh's notes on how to create a Philosopher's Stone. His notes are in the form of an unidentified book. And the book is written in code so you can't tell just by reading it that it's about the Philosopher's Stone. And it's in the largest library in the entire country. But since Lust and Gluttony desire to keep anybody else from reading the note, rather then read it themselves, {{spoiler|[[Cutting the Knot|they settle the problem rather neatly by burning down the entire building, books and all.]]}}
* In ''[[Bleach]]'', for Ichigo's [[Training
* In one arc of [[Detective Conan]], a priceless pearl is hidden from a [[Phantom Thief]] by giving every guest to a party on a ship a replica. Of course, this being the [[Magic Kaito|Kaitou KID]], he finds it anyway, but still.
* And in [[Code Geass]] R2, Zero {{spoiler|bargains with the Britannians to be exiled instead of executed along with the rest of the Black Knights. [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|Cue every member of the Black Knights dressing up in Zero's trademark outfit. Since the Britannians couldn't figure out which one was the real Zero, they were forced to let them all go]].}}
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* In ''[[Slayers|Slayers TRY]]'' (ep. 11 to be precise), a revenge-crazed [[The Gunslinger|Jillas]] devises a plan to steal the [[Laser Blade|Sword of Light]] from [[Idiot Hero|Gourry]] by getting him to fall on a huge pile of weapons with the same design, most of them useless (memorably, a bright red hammer). {{spoiler|''It works''. Gourry is [[Heroic BSOD|devastated]] by the loss, and carries the aforementioned hammer as a temporary replacement.}}
== [[
* [[Neil Gaiman]] did a more gruesome version of this trope in the ''[[Sandman]]'' comic. Joanna Constantine is tasked with rescuing the head of Orpheus during the time of the French Revolution. To confound revolutionaries seeking the head, she hides it in a pile of other heads belonging to guillotine victims.
* In ''[[Asterix|Asterix In Britain]]'', a keg of magic potion ends up with a multitude of kegs of wine. The [[Idiot Ball|Roman Army]] decides to find it by drinking from all kegs. Needless to say that doesn't work out too well...
* In ''[[Corto Maltese]]'', in [http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Celtiques#Burlesque_entre_Zuydcoote_et_Bray-Dunes "Burlesque entre Zuydcoote et Bray-Dunes"], the last story in "The Celtics", a killer disguised as a wooden puppet hides in a room full of similar wooden puppets.
* In ''[[Spirou and Fantasio]]'' book "Yellow-Horned Rhinoceros", the duo is tasked to find a microfilm containing a prototype supercar schematics. The duo learns that the man who had it gave it to an African tribal chief, who bored a random rhino's horn, put the microfilm in there, and...released it back to the wild, ''amongst thousands of other rhinos out there''. The eponymous yellow-horned rhinos are results of the duo's attempt to identify which rhinos they had tranq'ed, examined, and marked off.
* An ''[[Archie]]'' comic had one story where kids from a rival school swipe a noted football jersey that's Riverdale's Luck Charm, whereupon Archie and the gang swipe the rival's charm, a lucky coach's hat. After several
== [[Film]] ==
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** Also from ''Indiana Jones'', a government agency hides the [[Artifact of Doom|Ark of the Covenant]] in a shipping crate, which is stored in an [[Secret Government Warehouse|immense room filled to the roof with identical shipping crates]]. There is an implication that there are many artifacts like the Ark in the warehouse, and that the Ark was not necessarily being "hidden" per se. Syfy's [[Warehouse 13]] seems to explore this a little more in-depth.
** In ''[[Raiders of the Lost Ark]]'', Marion tries to hide inside a laundry basket, but gets discovered and is taken away inside the basket. Indy sees her, but eventually, he finds himself in a market square where dozens of people are carrying identical baskets. He frantically turns over every basket until he hears her shouting elsewhere.
* In ''[[I, Robot (film)|I Robot]]'', the lead robot character hides in a warehouse filled with robots, which was drawn from a similar short story in the original book ''[[I, Robot (literature)|I, Robot]]''. The critical difference between book and film enabled [[Cutting the Knot]] - where in the book the extra robot was a variant with only partially [["Three Laws"-Compliant]] (designed to permit humans to come to harm through inaction so they could work alongside humans in hazardous environments), the film had a {{spoiler|totally non-compliant robot hidden in the crowd - AKA one that freaked out when a [[Cowboy Cop]] started randomly shooting robots in the head.}}
** Given that the robots in question are intelligent, there is significant overlap with [[Lost in a Crowd]] - in both film and short story, it was the robot itself that decided to hide out amongst other, identical-looking robots (although the short story had the robot do so in response to a vague, unintentional order, rather than completely on its own initiative).
* In ''[[E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial|ET the Extraterrestrial]]'', the title character, who is a cute but not very human alien lifeform, hides in a pile of stuffed animals.
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* There's an illustrated [[Choose Your Own Adventure]]/[[Interactive Fiction]] book where you journey through an underwater world to find a treasure. At one point, you go into shipwreck and find a room full of navigational compasses, and the challenge is to find the one the ship's captain used. {{spoiler|Same trick as the Indy one-- it's a simple wooden compass, since the captain was poor}}.
* ''[[Harry Potter (novel)|Harry Potter]]'' likes this trope:
** In ''[[Harry Potter and the Philosopher's
** In ''[[
** In the beginning of ''[[
** Also in ''Deathly Hallows'', one of the Horcruxes is enchanted to create burning hot duplicates of itself every time it's touched. The duplicates themselves are similarly enchanted, so that touching the cup sets off a chain reaction that buries the thief alive in burning hot cups. ''Everything'' in the room is enchanted to burn and multiply if touched, which makes it all the worse.
* The plot point mentioned in the ''[[Return to Oz]]'' example originally appeared (slightly differently) in the book ''Ozma of Oz''.
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** Chesterton uses the trope earlier in "The Flying Stars", with a diamond hidden among many paste diamonds (referred to in the above conversation), and again in "Pond the Pantaloon" (not a Father Brown story) with a brown paper parcel hidden among numerous similar parcels.
* The last exercise in most of the ''[[Where's Waldo]]'' books hides the titular character among about a thousand Waldo lookalikes.
* ''[[
* In [[Terry Pratchett]]'s ''[[
** In ''[[
** Proving this trope doesn't take a genius to come up with, the drugged-out troll Brick hides from the Watch and the troll Mafia by tagging along with a bunch of other gutter-trolls in ''[[
** At the climax of ''[[
** ''[[
* In [[Andre Norton]]'s ''[[Witch World]]'' novel ''The Year of the Unicorn'', Gillan is magically split in two. Then her other half is surrounded by duplicates, and she has to pick out the right one.
* Subverted in ''[[Bridge of Birds]].'' Li Kao guesses that the [[MacGuffin Girl]] may have been transformed into a rose petal in a huge meadow of wildflowers, or a single raindrop in a thunderstorm, or any number of things... Except that
* ''The Twisted Thing'' by [[Mickey Spillane]]. The first elaborate murder plan having failed, the killer simply murders the victim with a hatchet, knowing his death will lead to a bunch of other crimes and revealed secrets among his [[Big Screwed-Up Family]] as they all scramble for his fortune.
* Subverted in ''[[Horton Hears a Who!]]'' when Vlad the vulture drops the clover that carries the speck of dust that contains the Whos into a huge clover field that Horton has to painstakingly sort through. Horton does just that and ''finds'' it.
* In John Myers Myers' ''Silverlock'', after Shandon falls afoul of Circe and is turned into a pig, Widsith must pick him out of a sty full of pigs to rescue him.
* In ''[[Krabat|The Satanic Mill]]'', an evil sorcerer turns his apprentices into ravens, then challenges the heroine to determine which one's her beau. {{spoiler|She succeeds because she senses which one of the identical ravens is afraid for her safety.}}
* In Connie Willies' ''[[To Say Nothing of the Dog]]'', Tossie's diary, which the heroes have been trying to get their hands on for most of the book, is revealed to have been hidden {{spoiler|in the library, "in amongst all those other books where no one would notice it"}}.
* In ''Winds of Fury'' of the ''[[Heralds of Valdemar]]'' series, freshly minted Herald-Mage Elspeth leads a [[Ragtag Bunch of Misfits]] into the lands of their archenemy, Hardorn, in an attempt to assassinate the nation's leaders before their armies overrun Valdemar. They conceal their ''extremely'' out-of-place appearances by posing as members of a wandering carnival. They cite an "[[Hurricane of Aphorisms|ancient Shin'a'in proverb]]" in doing so -- "Where do you hide a red fish? In a pond full of red fish."
* [[Isaac Asimov]] uses this trope in his short story "Little Lost Robot" in the ''[[I, Robot (literature)|I, Robot]]'' collection. A robot told to "go lose yourself" by an angry engineer does just that, by hiding in a shipment of 62 other robots of the same model as itself, and who differ from the lost robot only in that the lost one was a variant which is only partially [["Three Laws"-Compliant]] (designed to permit humans to come to harm through inaction so they could work alongside humans in hazardous environments) and otherwise looks, sounds, and behaves identically to the robots in the shipment. Suffice it to say, Susan Calvin has quite the challenge on her hands in tracking him down - especially as the lost robot not only mimics other robots, but is clever enough to persuade the other robots to mimic ''him''. She finally pulls it off {{spoiler|only by forcing it to outsmart itself. Though the robots naturally protected humans, and the lost robot could disobey to permit humans to be harmed, and persuade other robots to make sacrifices for a future good, it couldn't make the other robots as capable as itself. The lost robot could tell lethal radiation from non-lethal due to experience, and is suckered by a IR hazard the others saw as gamma rays.}}
** This story is referenced in a scene of the movie "I, Robot" when Sonny pulls the same trick (but only makes it work for a minute or two).
* In one of the first cases ''[[Brother Cadfael|Cadfael]]'' investigates, a murder victim is left among a bunch of corpses of men the local lord hanged for treason, presumably in hope that nobody will count them.
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'''Reid:''' Exactly. We're looking for a ''particular'' needle in a pile of needles. }}
* Done at least once in ''[[Murder, She Wrote]]'': The town is flooded with gossipy letters. Some are printed, some are written, some are typed; they're on all types of paper; and they are all mailed from Cabot Cove. In this case, {{spoiler|the letters were sent by the killer, who had been told by the victim that her friend who would mail a letter revealing their dirty dealings if anything happened to her. The killer inundated the town with mail, hoping the letter incriminating him would be taken as a joke}}.
* The tribble bomb in the ''[[Star Trek:
* Although ''[[Monk]]'' never did this in the main series, there is a case of this in the [[Expanded Universe]] novel ''Mr. Monk in Outer Space'' where a killer, dressed as a popular character from a TV show, shoots and kills the show's producer as he is arriving for a convention, then escapes into the convention center, vanishing because there are dozens of other people dressed in similar costumes to the killer's.
* In ''[[CSI]]'' there was an episode where a murder victim was put inside a body-farm: a place where bodies are put in a number of different positions/environments so people can learn how they decay. {{spoiler|It's also subverted as they immediately notice that it's out of place and not on record.}}
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* In Season 3 of ''[[Dexter]]'', after having killed a man in front of {{spoiler|Prado}}, Dexter lies to him, telling him he hid the body a foot underneath the soil... in a freshly-dug grave at a local cemetery.
{{quote|'''{{spoiler|Prado}}''': "Stroke of genius, man... hiding a dead body in a cemetery"}}
* Happens {{spoiler|by accident}} on ''[[Homicide: Life
* Rabbi Garfinkle explains on ''[[In Plain Sight]]'' that finding the needle is easy "If you are willing to look at each and every piece of straw." The rabbi has patiently spent years in a methodical search and successfully found one of Mary's witnesses. He tells her that witness protection works because "Criminals are lazy. That is why they are criminals. I on the other hand..."
* In one episode of ''[[MacGyver]]'', Mac is carrying a valuable Chinese artifact which he needs to get rid of in a
* In one episode of ''[[Covert Affairs]]'', an operative is killed right before delivering important information to the CIA. They know that he hid the information inside a period on a piece of paper. His cover was a college professor, so his house was ''full'' of books and writings. Trope played straight, but Auggie inverts the [[Stock Phrase]], describing it as "like finding a needle in a haystack... in a forest full of haystacks."
* ''[[The Amazing Race]]'' is a huge fan of this trope. One notable Road Block involved finding fake pieces of food amongst a huge table of real `food. The catch was that if you chose wrong, you had to eat the food you picked. This, obviously, became a huge problem when some teams made several dozen wrong choices...
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== [[Video Games]] ==
* While most [[Hidden Object Game]] use the standard "needle in a haystack" approach, or blending it into the existing artwork, sometimes you have to find the correct object amongst a pile of similar objects.
* In ''[[Nethack]]'', when running to the Astral Plane with the [[MacGuffin|Amulet of Yendor]], be sure not to confuse it for one of many Cheap Plastic Imitations of the Amulet of Yendor.
** There are a few easy ways to tell it apart. The genuine amulet cannot be placed in a container, and a plastic imitation is revealed by the "Identify" spell. The standard way to tell it apart is to {{spoiler|name it the moment you get it}}.
* In ''[[Ultima Underworld]] II'' there's a room with a single Corp rune among a whole pile of Kal runes. All runes on the floor use the same sprite, but Kal and Corp are virtually indistinguishable anyway.
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* In ''[[Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge]]'', Guybrush has to find a map hidden within a pile of maps.
* In the ''[[Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood|Assassin's Creed Brotherhood]]'' multiplayer game, there's an unlockable ability called "Morph", which, when used while stand in a crowd of people, will change all of them into duplicates of you.
* In ''[[Guild Wars]]'', the lair of the ancient dragon, Glint, is hidden inside a single grain of crystalline sand, in what is aptly known as the Crystal Desert. While it ''might'' be possible to find that grain and magic your way inside, finding a portal inside a specific ruin is much faster.
* ''[[Resident Evil
* At one point in ''[[Laura Bow]] : The Dagger of Amon Ra'', the stolen dagger is hidden in the museum gift shop in a row of replica daggers. You can tell it's the real one because it doesn't have "Made in Pittsburgh" engraved on it.
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* Pointed out by Florence in [http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff1500/fc01426.htm this] ''[[Freefall]]'' comic.
{{quote|'''Florence:''' ''A modern search engine can easily find a needle in a haystack. If you really want to hide a needle, you bury it in a needle stack.''}}
** Also,
* In ''[[Narbonic]]'', when Dave (in the appearance of Professor Madblood) is trapped on Professor Madblood's moon base, he tries to hide out in Madblood's hanger of 15000 robotic duplicates of himself. The real Madblood comes up with a very direct way of dealing with the problem:
{{quote|'''Madblood:''' "Attention robots! I will begin by strafing you with a flamethrower and then build from there!"}}
* In ''[[Erstwhile]]'', [https://web.archive.org/web/20130927175237/http://www.erstwhiletales.com/a-tale-with-a-riddle-0-4/#.T29xlNm6SuI the husband has to identify his wife among three flowers, all identical.] {{spoiler|She had visited him the night before to tell him how he could rescue her, and so had no dew on her.}}
* ''[[Chasing the Sunset]]'' had wizards hide spellbooks of those poking into [[Things Man Was Not Meant to Know]] - after the previous owner meets some messy end - in accounting, on the reasonable assumption that since no one in right mind randomly peruses things this boring and there are no legit incoming references, contents under a cover saying "addendum to the extended balance sheets of the year 742, vollume 8-c" will never be seen again. The only problem is that this approach isn't too original. [http://www.fantasycomic.com/index.php?p=7minwar "In fact so many people in the past had had this ingenious idea that the little accounting library had over the years grown to be the greatest concentration of powerful black magic books in the world."]
* ''[[Schlock Mercenary]]'', after [[Big Dumb Object]] escalation passed "you could drop Mars into that can, and then tuck Luna and Europa on top" point. How many completely automated housekeeping jobs can run there at once? [//www.schlockmercenary.com/2018-04-13 Well…]
{{quote|'''Iafa''': You built ''physical hardware'' from within a system you ''hacked''?
'''Putzho''': The Eina Afa mindframe is threaded through an ''entire world''. All I needed was replace a bus. I could have built an ''actual'' suspension bridge.}}
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* In the ''[[American Dragon: Jake Long]]'' episode "The Talented Mr Long", an ancient magical chalice is lost when it is dropped amid a stack of identical-looking cheap trophy cups.
** There's also the gryphon egg, dropped amid a pile of chocolate-covered Easter eggs. Jake and Fu find it by ''taste-testing'' the eggs.
* A recurring hero on ''[[Static Shock]]'' gets his powers from a [[Magic Amulet|beetle amulet]]. When a villain is about to destroy it, the hero uses the last of his power to create hundreds of identical beetle amulets.
* In an episode of ''[[WITCH (animation)|WITCH]]'', Cedric threatens to kill Matt unless Will gives him the heart of Kandrakar. Will responds by using magic to create several duplicates that disappear when touched. After Cedrick lets Matt go, Will reveals that she still has the real one.
* In a 1980s ''[[Looney Tunes]]'' TV special, Daffy Duck and Sylvester wanted to hide a golden egg for safe keeping, so Daffy painted it white and hid it among some ordinary eggs. This wasn't such a bright idea.
* At the climax of ''[[The Emperor's
* One episode of ''[[Fairly Oddparents]]'' had Cosmo and Wanda, at one point, search for their wands amongst a bunch of fake wands owned by Tootie.
* In ''[[Batman: The Animated Series]]'', Two-Face flips a coin to decide if one of his targets lives or dies. Batman hastily throws a box full of coins at Two-Face and he completely loses it because he needs to find ''his'' coin to decide.
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:Narrative Devices]]
[[Category:Mystery Tropes]]
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