#it follows Rule Of Cool / Rule Of Me Being Super Stressed And Chasing Any Ounce Of Joy

[benevolenterrancy]

@original-character-chaos I mean, this is mostly Rule Of Cool but me and @meso-mijali actually spent the morning trying to hash out a functional set of rules for this weird crossover!

Basically what we decided is that it comes down to Human / Animal(?) Rights Violations ("rules of civilized warfare" and all that)

In this au it was deemed inhumane to remove a pokemon from its trainer unduly because it would mean that the pokemon would either have to be released (which could be deadly for the pokemon if it was never a wild pokemon to begin with, or if it’s released outside its native environment) or kept locked in its pokemon ball indefinitely (because what soldier is going to take the time to exercise the enemy’s pokemon?) Both are potentially detrimental to its health, and it's understood that pokemon have at least some level of sentience.

Likewise (according to Meso, I don’t know enough Deep Pokemon Lore) it’s considered unsafe to travel outside cities without a pokemon companion (hence why you have to get one at the beginning of any game). So completely depriving someone of their pokemon is considered putting them at undue risk should a disaster strike. The pokemon world, with their wild pokemon, is just fundamentally more dangerous outside cities.

However, obviously in this au letting prisoners have an entire pokemon team with them while imprisoned would be absolutely impossible to manage. So the compromise drawn is that a captured enemy soldier is permitted to keep a single companion pokemon with them. If they’re captured with any more than that, then those pokemon are forfeit to the capturing force. So (in the case of the air force at least) it’s common for pilots to have a single pokemon they go on missions with, and leave the rest behind with either friends, family, or in a military facility. Taking a full team would put all those pokemon at risk. (So that gives the option for a lot of Drama in this au about which pokemon a person chooses to keep with them >:3c) This is why I'm only drawing each character with a single pokemon -- rather than their full team, this is the single partner pokemon they chose to travel with and with which they were captured.

Of course, within the camp it is then expected that prisoners are able to ensure their pokemon follow a very strict set of rules… if those rules aren’t met, then guards are permitted to take away the pokemon indefinitely. And since guards will generally have a full team of pokemon (and, yknow, guns), most prisoners realize that if they don’t want to be permanently separated from their pokemon it’s better to comply. Even during escape attempts, it's common for pokemon to be kept balled to make sure it can't be claimed that the pokemon were involved should they get recaptured. So the Heroes have to be pretty careful about what their pokemon are allowed to do re:missions… because if they’re caught, they could very well be forfeit.

Obviously, this would all crumble immediately with any real scrutiny, but this is the loose set of ideas we’ve come up with to allow this au to exist with some internal consistency... Though I welcome any further ideas people want to contribute to this!