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In the Amulet of Samarkand, Underwood says that more powerful spirits can turn invisible then summons an invisible spirit. Underwood is weak though and likely can only summon up to a mid-level djinn based on his fight against Lovelace and his reaction to Nathaniel summoning Batimaeus. Batimaeus never turns invisible although Farqual and Jabor do apparently as they get hit by a truck just after Batimaeus' theft. Furthermore, the guards Lovelace creates after the raid can turn invisible yet appear to be weaker than Batimaeus.

High level spirits never seem to turn invisible, Uraziel and Ammit both travel visibly which seems odd, especially in Ammit's case as he often goes around stealthily.

With this in mind what are the restricting factor for invisibility? Is it power, intelligence or can all spirits do it?

Bellerophon
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As for Underwood's "more powerful", you have to remember that Underwood has rather different standards of power from Nathaniel: his idea of "more powerful" probably doesn't mean much more than "particularly strong foliot". As far as everything else goes: it seems very well established that there are some abilities that are specific to some sub-types of demon: Search Spheres, for example, are specialised imps, and Horlas are djinni with some kind of ability to sap the essence of demons nearby. Changing appearance also appears to be a thing that requires some skill on the part of the spirit in question: Mwamba, in particular, is described as being better at it than others. On the higher end, afrits are described as being "spirits of fire" and having "fiery hooves", and as far as I'm aware, the only example of an afrit appearing in any other form is Honorius, once he was in Gladstone's bones, and that's rather a special case. Marids explicitly leave magical trails that can be followed, so stealth probably isn't their forte. That being said, we see so few of the higher-level spirits at all that we just might not have seen them do it.

bluesam3
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