Hidden information has led to some of my FAVORITE moments in Eureka.
Okay, so, imagine this: A group of homeless people are investigating a strange, grisly murder. One of them, Liv, is secretly a shapeshifting alien. As far as she knows, the others are human. She doesn't even know that any other kind of monster exists.
The group had followed some clues to an abandoned warehouse. They were on a balcony on the second floor of the building when they saw two angry gangsters enter on the ground floor. The guys saw the party up on the balcony, yelled at them for trespassing, and started towards the staircase. End of Session 1.
Liv was already off on her own near the only stairwell, so between sessions, I decided that she just hid to ambush them as they came up the stairs. She's homeless and hungry. And a large threatening dude makes as good a meal as anything. The GM and I did a secret session just before the second session to resolve the ambush. Liv dropped on the one in the rear, Andre, and rolled good enough stealth that the one in front didn't notice as she swallowed Andre whole.
Start of Session 2. The guy in front, whose name we never learned, continued up the stairs to threaten the rest of the investigators, not noticing that Andre had vanished. He got to the main group, and there was a little back and forth trying to convince him that the party wasn't a threat. Eventually he was like, "Andre, rough this guy up." Only for Liv to come in behind him and say, in a shitty gangster impression, "Sure thing, boss!" The guy turns around, surprised.
Immediately after Liv walked up behind the guy, another party member, Quill, took advantage of the distraction and opened fire. The party managed to kill the guy(I remind you, his worst crime was that he asked why they were trespassing. he was maybe going to rough them up a little. none of these characters respect the sanctity of human life.), but in the chaos, one of them, Emmet, who was secretly an android, had built up so much internal heat that he had to take off his shirt right then and there to vent it and relieve stress or he would literally catch on fire. Naturally, a bunch of heat vents popping out of his back revealed to the other characters that he was not a normal human.
Then, Quill, his long time boyfriend, saw this, and revealed that he was a living mannequin. (They seriously both thought the other was human. Their players didn't know about it. The whole table was surprised) Then, another party member, Mira, revealed that she was also a living porcelain doll.(the whole table was even MORE surprised.) All three of them had believed that they were the only living doll in existence, so they were extremely excited to find a sort of community.
Liv and the one other guy, Cyrus, were freaking out because "what the fuck? Three robots?" (neither of them knew magic existed.) They left the room to freak out in the stairwell and talk about whether they can trust each other(Liv was a shapeshifting alien who eats people, but she's just as surprised by the existence of talking dolls as Cyrus is). The dolls had a bonding moment about being fellow secret automatons.(while the gangster is still freshly dead on the floor between them) Liv, at this point, is a scared lonely alien, who has just discovered that (as far as she understands) androids exist, and they've got her surrounded. She doesn't know how ANY of this stuff works, so she panics and comes up with a theory: they must be secret government androids coming to drag her off to area 51 and study her. Why else would three androids follow an alien around? After the dolls had their bonding moment, they tried to comfort the other two. It didn't go super well. The conversation eventually turned to "what happened to Andre?"(there HAD been two guys who entered, and the others don't know Liv swallowed him whole.) Liv was desperate to find literally any alibi. So she started running around all over the place loudly wondering where he could have gotten to and making up any bullshit explanation she could think of.
But Emmet found evidence of the ambush on the stairs, and asked, "hey, weren't you right by the stairs when this happened?" Liv made up a lie, but Emmet noticed that liv was six inches taller than usual(the mass from absorbing an entire guy has to go somewhere.), so he followed up with "and didn't you used to be shorter?". Now, Emmet was NOT a secret government android. He had no idea aliens existed. He was just so socially inept that he asks weird questions all the time.
But Liv didn't know that. So, assuming she was about to be locked up in area 51, she immediately ran for her fucking life, rolled a 0 for her speed in the chase, and was immediately caught by Mira. Liv collapsed in fear. She grabbed the hem of Mira's skirt and begged for her life: "please don't kill me, I'll be a good alien, I don't wanna be a test subject, im scared of surgery, I promise I won't eat people," until she was just blubbering incoherently through the tears. And the others tried to gently calm her down because she was obviously in distress even though they had no idea what she was talking about. Being living dolls, none of them were too worried about her brief mention of eating people.
Eventually, once Liv had calmed down, she shapeshifted herself some doll-like joints to fit in with her new friends.
Meanwhile, Cyrus, the only actual human in a group of broken dolls, just took another long drag on his cigarette and tried to pretend that this wasn't the weirdest day of his fucking life. As a human, he was naturally a little worried that Liv had mentioned "I won't eat people anymore"
Mira, the only one of the characters with a home, invited the others back to bond over their newfound community of dolls, where she used her craft tools to patch up some of the damage that Emmet had taken in the fight. Being tired and homeless, none of them wanted to pass up her offer of a warm place to sleep.
Further dramatic reveals, as well as the character' fumbling attempts to get each other on the same page while having no real idea what the others thought was happening, escalated things further into romance, betrayal, death threats, narrowly avoided murder-suicide, romcom antics, serial killings, staged cryptid encounters, attempted domestic terrorism, and gender dysphoria. All because of the careful interplay of trust and incomplete understanding.
And they still had to solve that strange grisly murder.
