Ransacked Room: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|''Ransacking hotel rooms is probably safe,''|'''[[The Universal Genre Savvy Guide/Just for Fun|The Evil Henchman's Guide]]'''}}
You've got the [[MacGuffin]] and the [[Big Bad]] knows it. So is he going to send his [[Mook
Why not try to search your room first?
This is always ''intended'' to be while the character is
There's two methods. Sneaky, and rushed.
* The sneaky way, the character only discovers the search when he returns and finds it subtly
* The rushed way involves tipping over all furniture, cutting open mattresses, smashing windows, and dumping everything on the floor. Seriously, if the whatever is something small; the ''mess'' would be harder to find it in than anything else. Mooks that resort to the obviously ransacked technique may want him to know it's happened, may be [[Too Dumb to Live]], or may resort to it because it's quicker.
** Sometimes the mess is intentionally created to stop investigators from finding out what's been taken.
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== [[Comics]] ==
* [[Tintin]]'s flat is ransacked in ''The Secret Of The Unicorn'' after his [[MacGuffin]] is stolen. He doesn't discover the [[Plot Coupon]] which was formerly hidden inside it until
* There was a ''[[Mad Magazine]]'' satire once, which showed a picture of a room before being searched by the Queensland police, and then again after. It was very neat before, totally trashed afterwards. It was a puzzle: 'How many differences can you spot between this pictures?'. The correct answer, of course, was 'none'.
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== [[Literature]] ==
* In [[Dorothy Gilman]]'s ''[[Mrs. Pollifax|Mrs. Pollifax On Safari]]'', Mrs. Pollifax packs her case with great care and always in the same way. Because of this, she can pick up the subtle shifts that proved someone had searched it and repacked it, very neatly. (Note that tradecraft makes [[James Bond]] and Travis McGee carefully arrange things to alert them if they've been
* In [[Dan Abnett]]'s [[Warhammer 40000]] [[Gaunt's Ghosts]] novel ''First & Only'', Zoran comes to Gaunt because he is aware something is happening: he surprised a man searching his room.
** In ''Ghostmaker'', Gaunt is startled awake and catches Inquisitor Lilith in his room. She assures him that she would not have done it if she had known he was there.
* Emil Karpo (a Russian cop) in Stuart A. Kaminsky's Russian mysteries did that
* A grim subversion in ''[[1984]]''
** [[Mind Screw|They may have been lying.]] ''Maybe''.
* [[Harry Potter]]'s dorm room is ransacked by a Voldemort-possessed Ginny Weasley in ''[[Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets]]''.
** Technically, she wasn't possessed by Voldemort at that time. She could only be possessed when she had the diary in her possession. She ''was,'' however, terrified that Harry would talk to Tom Riddle in the diary and find out all of her secrets.
* [[J. R. R. Tolkien|JRR Tolkien]]'s ''[[Lord of the Rings]]'' has an inn room ransacked by the Nazgûl, and by ransacked, I mean beds that were stabbed multiple times with [[BFS
* ''[[Cthulhu Mythos|The Shadow Over Innsmouth]]'' has the character managing to escape a room ransack. Of course, rather than his mattress, they were planning on cutting open ''him''...
* Played with in ''Hard-boiled Wonderland''. Two men deliberately break into the [[The All-Concealing "I"|main character's]] apartment when he's there to both intimidate him and search/ransack the room.
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