Hacked Pokeballs

Game mode is strongly recommended, to keep repeated interactions with characters coherent and keep track of what people and pokemon you have captured.

This story was originally a branch of Pokemon: Human Capture by tempuraman. I am making it into its own story for three reasons: 1) Allowing deviations from the rules of the original story, such as making it possible (though difficult) for someone captured to resist orders by their trainer, 2) Allowing the use of game features, primarily for tracking captured pokemon, and 3) Because half my chapters on that story have been sitting in review for months without being posted, as a result of tempuraman not being online.

As with all of my stories, comments and added chapters are welcome. Please let me know if any routes end before reaching Petalburg City, I think I've gotten them all to go there, but I might have missed something or set up a conditional check wrong.

You looked at the code displayed on your pokedex while you sat in the back of the moving truck, contemplating whether you really wanted to go through with this.

You'd gotten your trainer's licence a month ago after turning eighteen, but you ended up not going on your journey right away. Your dad had been in talks with the Hoenn pokemon league about becoming a gym leader, and it sounded like you were going to be moving again. You didn't want to get interrupted or to be left in a different region than your family, so you decided to wait until you got here to start your journey.

Two weeks ago, you had gotten the idea to hack a pokeball's programming and make it so the pokemon you used it on would be unable to break out, as if the pokeball was a master ball. It had been a naive thought, and you'd realized soon after that if it really worked that way, there would only be master balls. The difficulty in breaking out of a pokeball was based on the pokeball's physical construction more than its programming.

But while investigating the code for that project, you had stumbled across something else: a simple if statement checking scan data against recorded samples and activating a failsafe if it matched. There were comments in the code noting what each sample was. Most were plants and fungi. But the first one on the list was not.

The first sample was for humans.

The thought had stuck with you, and now as your family was moving to start a new life in the land of Hoenn, you found yourself looking at the same code again.

If you deleted one line of code, you could capture humans like they were pokemon.

You stared at the screen of your pokedex for a long time, before a bump in the road knocked you out of your trance. You tapped a few buttons, and the line that checked against the human sample disappeared.

You'd really done it.

You didn't actually have to do anything about it. The pokeball would still work just as well on a regular pokemon.

...

Who were you kidding, you were totally going to catch a cute girl with this.

The truck stopped, then turned off, and you got to your feet. You'd made the same code modification to all six of the pokeballs you had bought, and on the last two, you'd also removed the code that checked if the pokemon was already registered to another pokeball.

You probably weren't going to use that option, but it couldn't hurt to be able to. You had made sure to mark those pokeballs by drawing little key symbols on the buttons. Then you had gone back and marked the others with stars, just to be safe.

The back of the truck opened, and you hopped out, passing a pair of machokes that belonged to the moving company. Your mom was directing them, but she stopped long enough to hand you a box of your own stuff and tell you to carry it up to your new room.

After you did so and set up a few of your things around the room, you sat on your bed to plan your course of action from here.