"Though making things invisible is entirely possible, it's also
      very, very difficult: so difficult, in fact, that, 99.9% of
      the time, it's easier to take the darn thing away entirely
      and just do without it."
        -Douglas Adams

    "Flying?  Flying is even harder..."
        -George, blue research magician

Controllable Flight: Why It Doesn't Work

   Wizards can do a lot of stuff, but one thing they just can't manage
is controlled flight.  Birds can do it; some reptiles can do it; even
idiot artificers in hot-air balloons can fly around.  So why can't
wizards?
   Well, it's not as if they haven't tried.  Lots of spells exist that
could conceivably produce flight.  A white mage, for example, could use
"Pillars of Light" to create stairsteps under his feet as he walked
about in the air.  A green mage could create wings on his back and
fly like a bird; or a red mage could use jets of fire and heated air
to propel himself into the sky.  Any of these spells could be used for,
oh, about ten seconds, tops, before even the most powerful wizard would
find his natural magic reserves exhausted and plummet to the earth.  As
for Blue...  Well...
   A blue mage can teleport anywhere he needs to be, but he can't fly at
all.  This is odd, since blue mages, being the most research-oriented,
are by far the most interested in the problem.  Their initial goal was
simply to negate gravity in a small region around the caster.  They
quickly discovered that this was like a man with a bucket trying to
negate water in a small region in the middle of the ocean.  It doesn't
work like that.  Never ones to give up easily, not with research grants
at stake, the bulk of the blue mages shifted to finding reliable means
of propulsion.  The problem the other colors had been having, they
reasoned, was that of trying to constantly exert large amounts of force
against the earth, which was an arbitrarily great distance away.  That
much force adds up quickly, and humans don't have that kind of energy.
(Well, all right, enough humans pooling their reserves could conceivably
acheive the required power.  Relying on ground sources, though, is
considered cheating, since a wizard is unlikely to have anything but
his own person available at any time when he really *needs* to fly.)
What kind of propulsion, wizards asked, doesn't require the expenditure
of energy, other than that necessary to start it going?
   In what was either a stroke of incredible genius or incredible
stupidity, one extremely clever blue mage happened on the concept of
magnetism.  Like repels like, he reasoned, and the Dirt has a magnetic
field; if I can just generate a powerful enough thaumomagnet (like
an electromagnet, but magical), I can use the power to levitate!
Unfortunately, few of his contemporaries shared his enthusiasm for the
project; they had done some calculations, and even if the mage could
have generated enough power to create the magnetic field, the resultant
flux would be enough to kill everybody for miles around, including,
of course, the unfortunate caster of the spell.  (It is a measure of the
power of this incantation that this would have been a *side effect* of
the spell.  And this was one of the cheaper flight spells...)
   Well, Daffyd the Overly Clever went ahead and published the spell
anyway, figuring that nobody could ever generate the power to cast the
thing.  And, sure enough, nobody has ever tried to cast the original
version.  Wizardly spells, however, are fairly easy to modify.  Enter
Evilfiend the Ungodly (originally Horace Fredsson; see MAGIC2.TXT
for a discussion of this phenomenon), a high-level black/blue research
wizard.  He found a way to modify the magnetic field to create a "safe
zone" at the center to ensure the caster's survival; but this was by
no means the only modification he made.
   To Daffyd, the fatalities resulting from the casting of his spell were
a flaw that made it nearly worthless.
   To a Black Mage with any necromantic power, deaths are a resource.
   Evilfiend the Ungodly found a way to lace the magnetic force resulting
from "Daffyd's Highly Impractical Levitation" with a necromantic power,
drawing energy from the deaths to further the casting of the spell.  He
locked himself in a small room in a major city, surrounded by small furry
forest animals, and began the incantation.  The animals' deaths boosted
the spell until its effects were felt a city block away, and their
subsequent reanimation as small furry zombies, combined with Evilfiend's
personal defensive shield and, of course, the magnetic field itself,
combined to form an almost impenetrable defense.  Wizardly counterspells
were foiled by the magnetic field's interference with magic; constructs
were slain by the zombies; and Evilfiend's protective shield kept him
unscathed as the building he was in was burned to the ground by fire
arrows.
   Things looked very bleak for the city until one guardsman made an
important observation: "Say," he said, "doesn't magnetism, like, attract
iron?"  The City Guard raided the armory for as many iron swords as they
could find, put them all in a small cart, and sent the cart towards the
region of greatest magnetism.  The swords were drawn to the unsuspecting
wizard, point first, like, well, like iron to a magnet.  The impact of
sixty-seven iron swords, all heavily magnetized from their travel through
the magnetic field, and incidentally moving at over 100 mph, overloaded
Evilfiend's personal defenses and aborted the spell with a release of
energy that was felt for miles around.  Evilfiend the Ungodly is
officially classified as "missing, presumed dead"; although all of the
swords were discovered, stuck magnetically together and clustered about
the point at which the wizard was last seen, very little was found
between the sword blades that could have been classified as a "body".
   Incidentally, the heavily-magnetized swords were discovered to have
some specialized and very useful properties, once somebody found a way
to pry them apart, and some of them can still be found for sale in nearby
regions.  Although a Magnetic Iron Sword has only the slaying power of
normal iron, the magnetic field interacts with the WSOGMM in such a way
as to disrupt many magical fields and attacks, most notably the White
spell Seal and most Red fire attacks.