How to get a model to recognize bones outside of it's own .cat?

[Sleevesies]

I think it would be pretty neat to be able to have an accessory have physics relative to a bone on the body, so that you can have more connected feeling accessories, for example, something like Naraku's hood if it was an accessory instead of part of her costume, or gloves and socks which you could mix & match with any costume?

in this test I tried seeing if I could just add more vertex groups to the puppet ball model, the vertex groups being the same ones used by her arms, so in theory these boxes should have been down in an A shape like her arms are, however they didn't follow the bones and instead floated in the air like this: 

then, I removed their weight on bone 758e43f9, which is the center bone that the upper part of the head is fixed to, I added 30% weight here as a fallback to make sure nothing crashed when I loaded in, but I removed all the weight to test and the boxes were gone, however in this next screenshot I added the weight back to a few vertz on the boxes so that we would see where the boxes were going to in relation to the main model:

so, as I've discovered, it's not recognizing the vertex group that the character's arms are assigned to, and is teleporting the boxes infinity distance away, as it does when the game doesn't have a bone to stick the mesh to.

does anyone know a way to perhaps allow for this type of thing?

Edited August 10 by Sleevesies

[Sleevesies]

just saw that I uploaded this topic 3 times, sorry for the pings... still not super used to this site's UI