Earthbound-inspired Lucky Star fangame, story planning

I am working on a Lucky Star fanfic titled Starbound, and have decided at this point to seek out ideas for the entire rest of the story before I continue much more organized than I am. I will pay in proportion to how much you suggest. With that, here are the following: The Lucky Star anime (basically a cute, gag-driven slice-of-life series about four teenage girls): [login to view URL] Summary of Starbound: Three of the main four get their hair updone by some magical stones, which then give them a sixth sense and psionic powers. From there, they and Tsukasa go on an adventure to meet other girls appointed by these stones and fight all manner of weird creatures. As they go along, they will also fight monsters who each guard a gateway to another dimension where the spirit of one of their ancestors resides, ending up in another part of the world each time they return to Earth. The main characters (just who they are, what they look like, and their ethnicities): [login to view URL] The fanfic (seven chapters to date): [login to view URL] Earthbound (just to give readers an idea of what I'm trying to create; its story is pretty complicated): - The game itself can be purchased on the Nintendo Wii U or New 3DS Virtual Console, as well as downloaded for free for an emulator. Hard copies are pretty expensive online. [login to view URL] - Walkthrough on [login to view URL] (w/ all pages indexed on side, as opposed to linear like on GameFAQs): [login to view URL] - My playthrough: [login to view URL] Some general suggestions: I would like us to: -keep this as true to the '00s as possible. -try to cover more obscure parts of the world, as well as more recognizable parts. -cover small towns and the middle of nowhere, as well as major cities. -not feel restricted to a given area, be that a town, county/prefecture, or even a country. Like at various points in Earthbound, the party should be able to travel around, whether merely crossing borders on foot or flying or teleporting to another part of the world. --Especially in the cases of small towns. I know most shows center all their events within a single town, and Earthbound places each chapter's in mostly just one, to keep things simple, true. However, in contrast, the Lucky Star anime has everyone spread out throughout a whole prefecture and even beyond, with Kagami and Tsukasa living in Washimiya (now Kuki), Konata living in Satte, their school located in Kasukabe, and Miyuki living in the suburbs of Tokyo, outside of Saitama Prefecture, and I would like to remain true to that. -Nostalgia would be another great source to draw inspiration from. (For example, I recall having visited a hotel on Sanibel Island, Florida, while my family and I visited my grandfather in 1995.) -And finally, let's avoid defaulting to national or ethnic stereotypes. Those can apply to a certain extent, as they do even in both the anime and real life, but the canon characters, living where the franchise was built, are not so stereotypical as they would be portrayed in something produced and set in America. (Basically, this is not The Simpsons or Mobile Fighter G Gundam, in case anyone's familiar with either of those.) ----- Basically, what I need you to think about is the following: -Where should the party end up after each of *twelve* trips through Magicant? -Where should the next gateway to Magicant be? -What should happen between each two visits to Magicant? Again, I will pay correspondingly to how much you come up with to contribute.