Headscratchers / Sleepless Domain

• Why is Sally unable to fly? Shouldn't she be able to, you know, shoot fire from her feet or hands and use it to propel herself up- and forwards like a rocket?
  • She probably never thought to do it.
  • The Alt Text for Chapter 2 Page 19 says: "She tried to use her fire for jet boots once. Never again."
• Are most magical girls unable to use their powers on other MGs? I just found it somewhat abnormal that Sylvia didn't whisk up Sally with her air powers.
  • I imagine that would take a decent amount of concentration that Sylvia just couldn't spare if they're in the middle of combat.
• What does Heartful Punch usually do for squishy monsters like the many-eyed one that Undine kills?
  • Punch them? She killed one in their first encounter, and complained she didn't like doing it.
• Who was spying on Heartful Punch and Undine's second training session?
  • We get an answer several chapters later: Cassidy. Which raises more questions than answers, really.
    • We finally get the full course of events in Chapter 16: she was training with Vedika at the time.
• For some reason, people in this universe (unless it's a quirk unique to Heartful Punch) write phone numbers in roman numerals—bottom-right of the note on this page. Two pages later, standard Arabic numerals are shown on a blackboard, so it's not like they haven't been invented. What's going on here? Is this just a meaningless alternate-universe detail, or a clue about something?
  • For what it's worth, Roman numerals were seen on the M.G.S.I. poster Tessa tore down.
    • By chapter 19, that piece of worldbuilding seems to have been abandoned.
• We see a cemetery for magical girls, but where are girls laid to rest if they were magical girls but died after their powers left them/after they are 18? How are the girls who fought the fight and survived until they had no power to fight with anymore honoured, for that matter?
  • Probably the same way(s) military veterans get honored in our world when they die.
• So what would have happened if Bud had taken BOTH of Cassidy's clones out at once with her lasers?
  • It would probably have been fatal. Bud presumably knew that, and knew that taking out only one was within the range of Cassidy/Flash Cut’s Powers.
  • Confirmed: a cat monster summoned by Goops destroys both her clones at the same time, killing Cassidy without a trace left behind though the monster is killed too and one clone stabs Goops in the eye.
• If the City is cutoff from the rest of the world, how is it self sufficient? Where do they get the food, a power source, the materials for a manufacturing industry that is large enough to warrant competitive advertising? Aside from the nightly monsters, no one seem concerned about running out of commodities like medication, or construction supplies. Heck the city is big enough that a 20 minute train ride is considered a short trip.
  • As the city is obviously pretty huge, it's more than likely that it contains extensive gardens for food and other organics. As for other raw materials, probably some combination of extensive recycling programs, possible mines, and possibly the occasional MG with useful matter-creation abilities (if you get, say, an MG who can permanently create large amounts of iron, then before she ages out she could feasibly create a stockpile that would supply the city's iron needs for decades).
    • The thing about that is it does sound like some degree of No Ontological Inertia exists here. Mingxing mentioned that her previous arm stopped working when the magical girl who built it aged out. So feasibly that iron stockpile just disappears when the magical girl ages out. This is probably something best left to Bellisario's Maxim.
  • Will, when bringing the book on fish guts, explains fish are able to cross the barrier (bringing their stomach contents in). If fish come through, so must water (most fish can't crawl on land). So at least some substances and some animals can cross. That's something.
• What exactly does it mean that "non-magical weaponry does not work on monsters"? We've seen monsters killed by dropping them or smashing them against walls or the ground, so obviously it doesn't need to be a direct magical attack that kills them. So what's the dividing line? Why can't guns or even swords or big rocks be used against monsters in a pinch? And what would happen if a normal citizen grabbed something heavy and smashed a monster with it?
  • Two possible answers I can think of. 1) Non magical weapons are less effective, rather than entirely ineffective, and thus can't take out the non-chumps. Vedika can take out a small one with a flare gun but it's not clean and still grabs her so a non magical girl would've been screwed. Similarly, smashing might work but be too unreliable in killing anything but the smallest monsters. 2) Magic has an 'aura' to it that means even just being near a magical girl makes a monster vulnerable (ie the smashing into the wall only works because it's a magical girl doing it) or the magic works off Killing Intent and they're using their power subconciously to boost the attack even with mundane methods.