if i was going to do this, my first order of business was to train up neverhappy. the previous owner had named her that because budew evolves from happiness and they were just going to box her so she would never become happy/evolve, i assume. as a result, it was emotional for me to go through this process and let her finally evolve after nearly 5 years of being stuck on pokemon platinum, abandoned.
part 2: recovery
first, i traded her to my platinum to walk around with her while filling out the "seen" portion of my pokedex, among a few other tasks. this is why i was at the old chateau - to get rotom for the pokedex lmao. while leaving, the message "NeverHappy used Cut!" sounded like something that would be written in a pokemon creepypasta to reference self harm, and it hurt me to read, so i went to delete the move as soon as she reached max happiness, since it felt appropriate to do it then.
i EV trained her while raising her happiness and completing tasks, and once that was done, i let her evolve into a Roselia and obtained the footprint ribbon, a physical representation of her joy, right on her profile!
afterwards, i temporarily traded her to my soulsilver and trained her up for a while by usage of EXP share on the elite four. then i got tired of that and transferred tons of rare candies that i cloned in emerald using the infamous emerald cloning glitch through the pal park. leaving her at level 99 and letting her hold a rare candy, i traded her back to platinum for the evolution. i evolved her into roserade...
and then did the honors of boosting her to level 100. after that, i easily knocked out the sinnoh champ ribbon with her and my level 100 linoone from soulsilver. (you may also notice another two ribbons sitting there unaccounted for, that's the effort ribbon for max EVs and a ribbon you get from talking to a lady in Sunyshore City once a day.)
at the end of all of this, neverhappy's set was as follows:
Roserade (NeverHappy) - Quick Claw - Gentle - 2/21/19/16/20/27 - Sludge Bomb/Leech Seed/Toxic Spikes/Substitute - 120 SPA/252 SPD/138 SPE
i know quick claw isn't really the best item to have here, maybe a big root, but i was literally too lazy to find one at the time and then i forgot to change it later LMAO. also her stats are funky since she's just a random grass encounter from the previous owner, so my thought process was to try and take advantage of her specially defensive nature.