Alice is given a supposed magic MacGuffin that will give her special/exceptional abilities. She does amazingly well, but then she loses the item. She goes back to her mentors, only to learn that it was just a useless placebo, and "the magic was inside you all along!" Sometimes the audience knows, or at least suspects, that Alice's abilities were her own, but other times The Reveal is just as much [...] [tvtropes.org]