Pokemon: Bounty Hunter Alex

When Alex and the girls returned from their vacation in Alola, one of the first things they discussed was his threat to Team Bones and how he would rehabilitate its criminal members. Surprisingly, everyone immediately came up with plenty of ideas. Considering they all worked for an organization that hunted criminals and had been victims themselves, Alex really shouldn't have been surprised.

Their ideas covered a wide spectrum of punishments and rehabilitation methods. Some proposed mandatory ethics education, imprisonment, and hard labor. Others suggested more invasive measures, such as memory erasure, forcing criminals to experience implanted memories of the suffering they had caused, or, in the most extreme cases, completely rewriting their personalities into someone else, effectively erasing the original individual.

The more radical suggestions quickly sparked a debate. If a person's memories, beliefs, and personality were altered beyond recognition, was the original person still alive, or had they effectively been killed despite their body remaining intact? The discussion soon shifted from rehabilitation to philosophy and ethics, with everyone arguing over where memory manipulation crossed the line into murder and whether such measures could ever be considered justice, punishment, or mercy.

Funnily enough, their first conclusion was that Alex’s own love triggers weren’t killing him. He was simply gaining something he should have had as a normal human, although they did feel guilty about hardcoding his love for them onto him, which was actually quite extreme once they thought about it. Alex quickly comforted them, though, saying that he preferred his new self over his old one before quickly steering the topic back on track.

They settled on a similar solution for the criminals, with certain hard lines. Each would undergo extensive psychic evaluations to determine how far gone they were. If someone could justify criminal activity as casually as walking from point A to point B, then they were considered beyond rehabilitation. There was no empathy left for their victims and no guilt over the harm they would cause, placing them far outside ordinary human morality.

These individuals either never possessed that capacity for empathy in the first place, which had led them to their chosen lifestyle, or had committed so many crimes that they had lost it entirely. Either way, they were deemed irredeemable and, therefore, should be executed outright.

The majority of criminals, however, had been led into that lifestyle for one reason or another. Some had grown up in poverty, others had fallen in with the wrong crowd, and many had been raised in environments where criminal behavior was normalized. These were the kinds of people who had never known a better way of life, making education, guidance, and support far more effective than hard labor.

In the end, it was decided that they would receive psychic implants designed to gradually amplify their sense of guilt. The process would be introduced slowly so their minds wouldn’t outright reject it. During rehabilitation, they would receive education, counseling, and support while the implant encouraged them to confront the consequences of their actions. They would also be exposed secondhand to the suffering of victims by partnering with bounty hunters as they carried out their usual work.

Once the program was complete, the implant's influence would be gradually reduced until it was removed entirely. They would then be observed and tested to see what choices they made on their own. If they avoided criminal activity, even when presented with easy opportunities, they would be released and allowed to return to society. If they immediately returned to crime, convinced there was nothing wrong with it, they would be deemed beyond rehabilitation and executed. Simple as that.

With their plans decided, they immediately began preparing the base for the new program, while the airship carrying Alex’s Rotom was dispatched to retrieve them a week later. Alex himself teleported over to meet up with Team Bones, and was now on his way back while conducting the initial psychic evaluations and administering the guilt-based psychic implants.

To start off, however, Alex checked the police records and quickly killed any criminal who had an extensive rap sheet. No matter what, the law took precedence over their little experiment.

“That leaves 145,” Alex said as he stuffed the last corpse into the bag. “It’s more than I initially thought.”

He had ended up killing nearly a hundred people who either had ambition to be criminals, had a warrant out for their arrest dead or alive, or simply didn’t have any sense of guilt to amplify via psychic implants. It wasn’t a surprising number, though, as he had initially picked these criminals for their ambition rather than as mere victims of their circumstances.

This left only those who were on the edge, confident in their way of life, ambitious enough to want to be criminals for an easy payout, and ruthless enough to commit crimes while ignoring the consequences, but still with enough morals to know that what they were doing was wrong. This made them the most psychologically unstable group, as they constantly rationalized their actions while still retaining a sense of conscience.

“Let’s remove any memories that would act as a driving factor for their criminal activities and also remove the recent sense of betrayal from Team Bones. They’ll be loopy and inconsistent at first, but hopefully they’ll build up enough guilt that they’ll learn to let it go if anyone tells them what they’ve been through,” Alex instructed Gardevoir.

It wasn’t part of the plan, but Alex ultimately found it necessary. The fewer obstacles there were to feeling guilty, the better, and experiences where they felt betrayed, oppressed, or cheated by society were often a powerful driving force to commit crimes while ignoring their victims’ pleas. It would change them as people and cross a line, but given their current circumstances, it was a necessary change.

“Also, forward all the information you got from those we killed to the police. It’ll be good to have their operations shut down all over Alola now that they don’t have an Elite or Expert backing them.”

Of those Alex ended up killing, they were usually at Expert, Elite, or Champion rank. They were old enough that they no longer felt guilt for their crimes, so they weren’t suitable for the program. Nothing short of psychological death would fix their minds and allow them to live peacefully in society. What remained were their henchmen, second-in-commands, or group leaders in charge of gangs.

Meanwhile, the majority of the gangs were left back at Po Town without a leader to push them into criminal activity, left in the hands of the peaceful faction to whip them into shape with the proper drive and mentality. There would likely be resistance at first, but based on their personalities from Gardevoir’s memory scans, they would eventually abandon their bravado in favor of a more peaceful way of life.

“Thanks, Gardevoir, good work,” Alex said as he caressed her hair. “Rotom, keep them sedated for the journey back, and see you in a week.”

“Affirmative.”

Alex wasn’t about to waste an entire week giving orientations to all of these people. That was better left for the girls, the teachers, and the psychiatrists who were paid specifically for it. Instead, Alex teleported back to the base and joined the girls in preparing for their eventual arrival.

A week later, 30 volunteers were selected from Elite ranked bounty hunters to babysit the criminals while they underwent therapy. Each bounty hunter would be in charge of five of them at a time, divided in such a way that they weren’t part of the same group or gang, ensuring there was no sense of camaraderie between them. As far as they were concerned, they were all victims of the situation, without any outlet.

In the dining hall of the main hub, 145 individuals slowly woke up to find they were divided into 5 with a rather intimidating bounty hunter standing over them.

“What happened?”

“Where are we?”

“Who are you?”

“Silence!” Alex said, his voice cutting through the building chaos while his Champion ranked aura radiated outward, silencing everyone. “You have been arrested and are currently undergoing rehabilitation to earn the right to be a normal human again. The worst of you, your leaders, bosses, and some of your peers, have already been killed, so you can forget about them, because you might follow right after if you make a fuss.”

Apart from a few who had good relationships with their leaders, everyone else immediately snapped to attention. They were used to being controlled by fear, after all.

“From this point on, you will be shadowing the bounty hunters in front of you, who have the right to kill you at their discretion. Best of all, not even the police or your families can help you get out of this. Only you have that power. All you have to do is be a good person. Simple, right? If you manage to survive until the end, we’ll get off your case. If not, then it wasn’t nice knowing you. Take them away.”

Like drill sergeants, the bounty hunters yelled at them to get up and run the obstacle course outside, while their Pokémon were out in the backyard getting a lesson of their own in human morality from Alex’s Pokémon. Once they were dead tired and started collapsing, they were scheduled to meet with the psychiatrist one-on-one before receiving a seminar on ethics. It was a month-long crash course on discipline, laws, and basic human decency before they went off on missions with their assigned bounty hunter.

“Do you really think this will work?” Vera asked.

“We’ll know in a few months,” Alex answered. “For their own sake, it had better work.”