Water Puzzles
Perhaps you have beheld the new trend of Water Puzzles, the bane of every school of late, and you can already picture in your mind the array of tendrils of ice reaching out of a wall, like a ball and peg game at a festival. Perhaps, dear average age of 45 reader (according to recent census survey results), you are even one of the adults with a duty to get these adolescents to, as they might say, knock it off.
If your heart points to this, then stretch your fingers and take note of required supplies as you read them, for we have the solution to your plight, and we'll waste no more time.
Firstly, search the non-magic shops for a product called "rubber bands". These are a primitive reusable fastening device, but their elasticity is what concerns us. Find the thickest ones you can, in all dimensions. More experienced readers might even be able to transmute one just by description alone, but beware: this substance has messy duds. This is not a parlor room experiment.
Secondly, also acquire a very dense small object. To remind, this means something heavier than it would appear. A quite easy way to do this is to show up at your local fishery and ask for a spare "lead weight". They are cheaply made and produced in bulk, but are hard to acquire outside of fishing supply stores. Again, more experienced readers might be able to transmute this themselves.
Thirdly, transcolorize the dense object and the rubber band to be clearsea. This ritual color blends well with the wild seawater summoned by most water-related spells. MER can experiment with their own water summoning methods (good for more advanced color-based puzzles to make the prank hit harder for atrocious nerdish types).
Fourthly, pinch one apex of the "rubber band" against the lead weight, pinch the opposite apex to the puzzle wall, and stretch the weight out as far as it will go before it snaps. And in fact, interesting effects can be afflicted if the fifth step is completed as an instant reaction to this step.
Fifthly, freeze a spike of ice to cover the rubber band. If done correctly, it will be nearly impossible to discern what is going on inside the spike, and if done at a virtuosic level, it will be completely possible to discern a flaw in the spike whatsoever.
To explain the joke to those who can't already guess what happens, when a puzzler performs a basic flipflop on the ice spike, the ice will be discipated into air, leaving only a tense spring floating in front of them. the weight gives the tension an "anchor" to pull on, so it can fling past the anchor and into the face or hopefully even the eye of the loathesome puzzler.
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excerpt from some shitty old book