Gradient Masks

I know Flash doesn’t allow masks to make things fade out but are there any tricks around this? There’s just some animation I need to do that work look right any other way.

Oh and just another question. How is it done so that you have several “webpages” loaded in a flash movie, but they only load when you click the link to go there. Like 2advanced.com or those kinda things. It only loads the ‘portfolio’ page when you click on the button, but it all seems like it’s just one flash movie.