#also with the prevalence of telepathy in the pokémon world there'd be a nonzero chance buddy would have some level of telepathy

[pangolin-404]

Pokémon AU has me intrigued… tell me more

sniles so sneetfully

the Company is your good ol stereotypically evil organization, that shoots people into Ultra Space for exploration and resource harvesting. (All of the abandoned structures seem Company-owned, but they don't talk about that...) also ultra space isn't as rigidly separated as it is in-game and it's kind of unclear if they're in space or a different dimension

The entities include environment-typical Ultra Beasts, plus known extraterrestrial Pokémon for some biodiversity. this can be normal things like Elgyem, Clefairy, Staryu, Unown, Lunatone/Solrock, or yknow. Deoxys. The Pokémon in these areas tend to be violently hostile to humans and maybe a bit messed up from the Company oozing radiation or whatever into the environment around the facilities

Masked (including Buddy) are Nihilego. They "possess" people by puncturing through their helmets to poison them to mad violence, and this eventually kills them and lets the Nihilego puppet the corpse around. And Nihilego can turn invisible, which adds a new wonderfully frightful flavor of encountering one I think

The crew themselves run into Buddy, via it latched onto Nines' long-cold corpse, and the rest goes about the same as normal buddycrew story. Buddy poisons and eats smaller Pokémon (mostly Poipole)

One thing to add is that Buddy is not "caught" by them. It joins them and though they might offer it a Poké Ball once they trust it, or again once they become earnest friends, it'd have no interest in it. If the crew did leave the Company with Buddy, it would allow itself to be captured to be safely smuggled out of Ultra Space, but afterwards either a) it is released and Poké Ball is destroyed b) its Ball is put at the bottom of a drawer and never used again.

I'd almost call this AU more lighthearted than normal canon buddycrew, but I mean the crew do have to work knowing a Creature could come and try to eviscerate them with a Beam Attack of some sort at any moment. but also because new weird Pokémon are readily accepted in-universe, Buddy would not have to keep itself hidden post-Company. however, it would have to learn that it's not socially acceptable to eat Pidove off the street.

I haven't decided if the crew would keep another Pokémon. If they did, it wouldn't be anything big, maybe an Espeon (as Buddy does get a cat in normal buddycrew world)

also buddy CAN latch onto things without poisoning them to death and would enjoy being worn like a weird hat