I’m genuinely not sure what you mean by “change in circumstances.”
But — at the risk of being kind of a dick about this — none of these Q&As seem especially, uh, lateral. Like, if I’d seen the ostensible volunteer from the first performance show up as an ostensible volunteer or a fully-declared magician’s assistant in the second, the solution is simply A Whole Bunch Of Details I Left Out; instead, if I’d slightly reworded the original post, you’d maybe have had the answer in no time flat.
That’s the thing with these puzzles. In any given puzzle, most of the elements are normal. There’s usually just one or two weird things going on. So we have to rule out all of the parts that actually are normal, before we can narrow down on what the weird part was.
(But that’s kind of hilarious. “I’ll patiently show you, step by step, how to do ten different magic tricks. I’m going to really spoon-feed this to you. Am I going too fast? I’ll slow it down.” “Omigosh, you guys: I’m so smart, I just figured out how he does one of his tricks!”
I kind of tabled this question in hopes of getting it clarified, because I wasn’t sure what you had in mind — but I don’t want to dodge a question, so lemme do my best: it’s not that, say, the first performance was indoors at a nightclub, and the second outside in daylight; and it’s not that he was standing next to a big prop the first time, but for some reason was on stage without it the second; and it’s not that he showily gestured with both hands the first time, but had one arm in a sling the second; and it’s not that the audience was seated in front of him the first time, but all around him the second. And I could go on, but my point is that, no, all of those “circumstances” (and anything else of that sort) were apparently unchanged — be it the lighting and the time of day, or the stuff on the stage and his nothing-up-my-sleeve costuming, or whatever.
…since this seems to be losing momentum, should I simply type out the details of that trick from the first performance instead of fielding individual questions about ‘em?
Were the two performances intended for the same audience? That is, was it expected that people would see both of them?
Was the second performance a magic show at all?
…since this seems to be losing momentum, should I simply type out the details of that trick from the first performance instead of fielding individual questions about ‘em?
I’m not ready to give up yet, but if you mean it as a hint, now is probably the right time for one.
Correct; no twins (and, no, I’m not building up to a ’gotcha’ reveal that it was triplets, or whatever: no lookalikes who are dead ringers for each other were involved).
You have said that there were no fiddly mechanical differences between the two performances, but what about broader differences? Were the two performances intended for entirely different audiences? Say, one for adults and one for children?
Well, take that bit I mentioned about a magician opening an envelope to produce a slip of paper; even if I didn’t see any sleight of hand, and lacked the skill to manage it myself, I could figure that an expert could’ve swapped in a substitute right as he reached in. Or I could figure that it could’ve been a gimmicked envelope, where one of a number of slip-of-paper predictions could be deftly removed as desired.
But both of those were ruled out by him keeping well away from the prediction after it went from his hand to the volunteer’s — well before his instruction to her to call out whichever choice came to mind — and, far from him reaching into an envelope that could’ve contained multiple pieces of paper, it was only ever one piece of paper, which was still in her hand (and nowhere near his) when she uncrumpled the singular fact of it and showed its message to the rest of the audience.
(Which brings me to ruling out a plant: explaining that he was selecting someone at random, he gave that crumpled ball of paper an over-the-shoulder no-look toss capable of doing just that.)