#buddycrew

I have

and this ask made me want to draw them again

four art students who are having the best apocalypse ever because they're together forever. unfortunately this AU seems to finally break my "buddy is never human" streak but it's keeping the mask. that's its face. it had that on when it looked outside

they're fairly lucid, they just don't care what's going on outside of one another/themselves. they lounge in their shared apartment being mushy. at most, they'd be intrigued by the astronomers, mistaking them for a LARP group and finding their robes really cool. maybe near the end of the Visit, they run out of food, and Sam has to feed them so they stop losing their minds and trying to eat him

the hands puppet the jaws of whichever head is speaking. they typically speak separately, maybe with differently colored dialogue like the Exalted Four, but if they as a whole get upset or feel a strong emotion, they speak more overlapped or in unison. they share control of the body. this also means that they suck at moving when they're not focused. just trip them and they won't be able to stand again until they calm down and by then they won't want to fight anymore

some buddycrew doodles. they're a clingy bunch

during their company time, if a crewmate couldn't sleep, they'd crack and lay on the uncomfortable ship ground with buddy. nothing like cuddling up to a warm husk to soothe one's nerves

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Lethal Company (Video Game) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Employees & Masked (Lethal Company), Employees & Butler (Lethal Company) Characters: Original Characters, Butlers (Lethal Company), Masked (Lethal Company) Additional Tags: Weird Biology, Violence, Attempted Murder, Body Horror, Transformation, this wip began when v50 dropped and should be read with that 'what the hell is a butler' energy in mind Series: Part 5 of four of them! Summary:

Having a masked on the team didn't make all that much of a change to their workflow. Buddy, if anything, was more durable than its crewmates, because it kept moving in just about any condition. Its crew were used to its perpetual decay. It was normal. Even if Five thought something was up, after days spent on Dine.

Dine air does strange things to masked.

cookie run: I haven't considered it but it does not particularly interest me

undertale: surprise funfact but I have a personal hatred and loathing of undertale aus I genuinely cannot stand them even mentioned in passing. no

media that HAS been considered: non-exhaustive list because I've probably forgotten some

look outside: [post about this au] like pressure au, they're gestalt thing but slightly to the left

pressure: [post about this au] gestalt thing. a buddycrew who love each other so fiercely they share a body about it. one of the buddycrew aus that's been at the forefront of my mind more recently

pokémon: [post about this au] the human crew are sent into ultraspace/normal space to scavenge scrap from abandoned stations, and try not to get killed by pokémon on the way. buddy is a nihilego

umamusume: ok this one's kind of a crack au. like deeply unserious. they're horsepeople who run races and gordion is like hardcore into making horsepeople run for entertainment instead of sending them to death in space. I mean gordion's still running these people to death because of the physical strain but

runaway to the stars: [post about this au] theyre swag aliens

among us: not pondered much but the thought of it exists. very little changes except the whole buddycrew story takes place allllll in a spaceship rather than on and off moons.

the upturned: also kinda a crack au. takes place in a scenario where buddycrew Genuinely Die and go to the upturned afterlife. they have a crisis over whether masked have souls and then it crawls very scary out of the bushes and everything's fine

slay the princess: LIKE ONLY THOUGHT ABOUT ONCE OR TWICE but p much everything's the same except buddy is essentially The Long Quiet with different facets of its personhood being its "Voices" (along the lines of: Voice of the Hunter, Voice of the Fleshly, Voice of the Loyal, Voice of the Bestial (mask hornet), Voice of the Crowd))

minecraft:

(solving counting sheep is an EXCELLENT minecraft youtuber fanfiction that changed my brain chemistry and STRONGLY influenced buddy's characterization. it's really good. read it even if you don't know anything about any of the characters)

other flavors of au:

swap au where buddy is the only human in a crew with three masked

au where everything's the same but some or all of the human crew are werecreatures. company life makes living like this hell. (seven - werewolf, five - peltless selkie, fifteen - vampire)

au where everything's the same except buddy (and masked in general) is buggier. has the little leggies and is just buggier and that's it

au where everything's the same except masked grow wings. every brainrot needs an angel with a shotgun amv au. YES its crew preen its feathers and it has the loveliest softest wings

merthing au

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)