aka: His Dark Materials style daemons, except they are pokemon, in space.

A fleet of generation ships containing a million passengers travels in search of a new home after the pocket dimension their world was in started to collapse. They are 208 years into an estimated 274 year journey to a star with a planet that can support life. They do not have FTL, but are researching it. Tech is "20 minutes into the future", with daemon abilities patching the gaps needed to keep everything running.

Every person is born with a daémon which initially takes the form of a Ditto and settles during puberty into a pokémon fitting their personality. Daémon are similar to daemons from "His Dark Materials" in many ways, including touching being painful, preferring to communicate with other daemons, and needing to stay close to their human, though come from a different source. They are each able to learn up to 4 Moves at a time, available moves varying by species. Moves can do a variety of useful things such as create silk from nothing (String Shot), power generators (Thunder), heat or cool areas (Fire Blast, Ice Beam), or teleport between ships (Teleport).

Culturally, they are partially theocratic with a religion called Totemin. Legendaries (which make up 1 in 100,000 people) are considered important and are put in charge of the Judicial branch of their government. Many cultural features revolve around daemon element where a normal human civilization might have gender, and wearing the color of one's daemon or type is mandatory. Some daemons are forced to take certain jobs, if they are rare enough (Gear Grind and Magnet Bomb, both only learnable by a handful of species, are the only way to produce the highly sought after metal iron), while others are merely pushed into jobs by stereotyping. There also was a severe prejudice against people whose daemons had senses that humans had no analogue to, such as electroreception, though this has mostly faded.

Life on the ships is cramped but otherwise pleasant enough. People are given busywork to prevent unrest, producing plenty of entertainment and a fast-revolving fashion industry where nearly everyone has personally tailored clothing.