Being able to laugh (darkly) at your own mistakes will be important in this quest I see!
If the choice is laughing or crying, then choose laughter. It's easier to clean up.
Let me be more straightforward. If you want your readers to notice these things, to not "tend to forget it exists", you need to make them more explicit. If you don't, don't be surprised when your audience disappoints you.
You imply I want that, though. If you fail to win everything, then c'est la vie. If you fail to win anything, then I have made some miscalculations. So far, I cannot speak as to where I stand with this except with this mildly dry tone that implies I'm not going to ditch this yet.
As an add-on to this, if you write based on experiences that most of your readers don't have any familiarity with (and I imagine most people posting here don't have any exposure to the realities of endemic poverty beyond the occasional news article), then you'll need even more signposting, because they'll have no way of knowing the significance of a Clue you drop based on those unshared experiences. If your Clues are all between the lines, we may not even be able to deduce that there are any Clues.
On one hand, yes. I'm fighting a lot of 'this is obvious' moments when it comes to the writing, and moving things around to be more obvious (the fact I don't describe everyone's wealth by shoes for example) is an ongoing challenge.
On the other hand, no. While the aesthetics of the quest and a lot of the plot are built on and in the expectations and realities of poverty, the individual plot points and arcs aren't. The first arc was getting to know the girls, then there was Homer and Homer being a little ball'o shit, the disaster with Jocelyne (which honestly wasn't planned, y'all were gonna get Chris back then but it was a fun plot thread to run with and you got an almost as good mechanical bonus), and then your glaringly obvious prep time... and now this. While none of these are tropey messes since I have
some dignity, they do follow common storytelling patterns in general and the more specific sort that this site breeds. There shouldn't be any alien concepts hiding critical information here- everything can be found with a little digging.
Edit: Also, question, has Homer actually interacted with the cat or is he just humoring MB by doing the following?
Homer knows there's a cat that has an amount of magic attached. The status of possession of that cat is not known.
Also, the boundary seems like its an important aspect of how the intervention from beyond the grave by dead magical girls that the QM hinted at is potentially a thing. Maybe acting as an anchor for such intervention due to both its strength and connection that the magical girls form to Medicine Boy.
Yes but no? If burial at (freshwater) sea was taken and you consequently got the Army of the Damned on tap, the trigger to summon them would be something breaking the first threshold, at which point every dead magical girl comes back screaming in with the arms they were buried with and a host of those they fell in glorious battle as their retinue. Likewise, if interment won, all the thresholds would be ridiculously reinforced- forget stopping someone from crossing the line in the sand, you could probably tank a plane without debris getting in your parking lot. Cremation, though, doesn't tie into a threshold since it is an expression of freedom. Mystically, it ties to something else, which then ties off to all the girls who live in the building. Once this crisis is over, you'll probably find out what since that's when I'm planning on rolling out some fresh hot loads of spoilers.
Here's a hint, though:
someone had to know that Calypso could be given a soul.
