The tale of Honest Jeremy

	The story begins with the invention of artificially generated psionic signals by Dr. G.D. Fitzgerald.  Dr. Fitzgerald devised a way to convert electrical energy into psionic waves using an apparatus he termed the "Fitzgerald coil."  Two problems kept the device from changing the way communications were sent.  First, the coils could send powerful signals over short range, but to reach farther than a few feet required tremendous energy expenditure.  The second problem was the inability to specify a target mind.  The waves would be accessible to anyone within range of the Fitzgerald coil.  Dr. Fitzgerald worked on this problem for years, but never managed to overcome the limitations of his invention.

	Ten years later, another researcher felt he'd devised a practical application for the Fitzgerald coils.  Dr. D. H. Roberts surmised that the short ranged yet powerful signals could be used to restrain violent criminals.  He fitted a small version of the device into a collar to be worn by a convicted felon and included a database of directives the coil would broadcast.  Ideally, the telepathic transmissions would prevent the criminals from engaging in any violent actions while incarcerated.  Since the effective range needed was only a few inches, the power requirements were actually rather low.  The problem with this application wasn't a technical limitation, but a social one.  There would be no way to get such a device past those people concerned with civil liberties, so the government shelved the concept.  All notes on the Fitzgerald coils and the Roberts criminal restraint collars were stored away in classified files, presumably for reasons of national security.  They would have remained there untouched, had it not been for the arrival of Dr. Jeremy Coveld.

	Dr. Jeremy Coveld was a brilliant researcher in the field of psychology.  He could deduce patterns of thought and actions from the smallest samples.  Government intelligence agencies found Dr. Coveld extremely useful in plotting the likely behavior of foreign leaders and their agents.  Timely and accurate predictions helped to prevent a number of unfortunate incidents that enemies were planning to bring about.  After a time, the intelligence agencies opened most of their files to Coveld in order to facilitate his work.  These files proved immensely useful, both in Coveld's regular work and in his secret occupation.  What few people knew was that Dr. Coveld also engaged in a criminal enterprise, the conditioning and sale of pleasure slaves.

	A number of well-connected businessmen and politicians paid large sums of money for servants trained and conditioned to do whatever they were told without question.  Coveld was only too happy to provide such playthings, but the problem was in the time involved.  It could take months or even years to brainwash a victim to the extent necessary for such servitude, and the slightest outside influence could ruin Coveld's intense work and require him to start over from the beginning.  He had trouble meeting the demand for his trained playthings, as the efforts in producing just one took up a great deal of his time.  Then he found the notes on the Fitzgerald coils and the Roberts restraint collars.

	It didn't take him long to see the potential in these collars, so he copied the notes for his own sinister purposes and began building his own models for testing.  He determined that the collars would take his programming just as well as the original anti-violence routine, so he wrote obedience orders into the collars to make the wearers into perfect slaves.  The original Roberts model used battery power and therefore required periodic recharge to remain operational, but Dr. Coveld opted instead to incorporate a power generator called a thermal siphon.  The thermal siphon would produce constant current sufficient to power the collar so long as the wearer had normal body heat emissions.  For this reason, the Honest Jeremy Neurocollars were always cool to the touch.  Once he'd completed the design on the new collars, he began selling his new model slaves to the demanding customers.  They were a big hit, and Dr. Coveld continued devising ways to make them even more popular, eventually combining his Neurocollars with drug implants and even genetic alterations.  His wealth and the popularity of his slaves continued to grow tremendously.

	Honest Jeremy eventually had to expand his operations.  He began employing teams of what he euphemistically referred to as recruiters to bring in potential subjects for enslavement.  Some of the more talented recruiters eventually became Honest Jeremy franchisees, and got a supply of Neurocollars and drug implants for a percentage of the sale price of the women they enslaved.  On top of that, Dr. Coveld began getting more and more requests for specific slaves.  Some customers had a specific person in mind when they went to Honest Jeremy, and so he and his recruiters often had to take on the task of kidnapping celebrities.  The highest profile kidnapping was that of Lira Deyasi.

	Lira was a singer and guitar player with the band Falling Rock Zone, and she'd also appeared in several movies and television shows.  She was probably one of the most popular musicians of her time, and one of her fans decided he had to have her to himself.  He contacted Dr. Coveld and made his request.  Dr. Coveld stated his price, and the fan actually managed to pay it.  With the money in hand, Honest Jeremy took a little time to formulate a plan and then set out to fulfill the contract.  He gathered information on the location of one of her concerts, and took the place of her driver while she was on stage.  When Lira came out to her car, she ended up being gassed and taken to the Honest Jeremy headquarters instead of being dropped off at her hotel.  The car and the real driver wound up being dropped off a steep cliff later.  Lira wasn't able to resist the effects of a Neurocollar any better than the other victims, and so she became the property of the man who'd paid for her enslavement.  The disappearance of such a popular celebrity drew a great deal of attention, some of it from people Dr. Coveld didn't want to have investigating him.

	Kerri Tyll and Lyssa Veneil  were two of the best detectives working for the police department, and when they began searching for clues leading to Lira Deyasi there was little doubt that they'd find what had happened to her.  Dr. Coveld couldn't let that happen, so he had to take steps to make sure it didn't.  He contacted some of his customers in the field of organized crime to get more information on the pair of detectives, and he found out they had both interfered with the crime syndicate on multiple occasions.  With the help of his own recruiters and the crime syndicate he set a trap for the detectives.  He placed false leads intended to lead them into a place of his choosing and once they were there his best marksmen hit them both with tranquilizer darts.  The two detectives ended up at the Honest Jeremy headquarters just like Lira had.  They found out what had happened, but not in the way they intended.  In exchange for all the assistance, Dr. Coveld turned the two newly collared slaves over to the crime syndicate, who put them to work in an underground brothel.

	Dr. Coveld got other assistance from the syndicate as well.  There were few people who could launder money as well as professional criminals, so Honest Jeremy was able to claim his profits as part of legitimate business earnings.  One bank employee named Collette Blake became suspicious of some of the transactions with Coveld's accounts, and she decided to try something risky.  She contacted Coveld and demanded a large sum of money in exchange for her silence.  He agreed quickly and set up a meeting for the payment.  Collette didn't know just what sort of business Jeremy Coveld was in, so she was completely unprepared for what happened at the meeting.  Dr. Coveld handed over the money, but when Collette turned to leave with it, he shot her in the back with a tranquilizer dart.  When Collette recovered from the dart, she was in the Coveld lab undergoing one of the genetic transformations Honest Jeremy had devised.  Collette started out as a human, but Coveld turned her into a skunk morph before putting her into a Neurocollar.  He started calling her Neurocollette and made her the official mascot of the Honest Jeremy slave girl service.  He also kept her as his own plaything.  Interestingly, he never actually took back the money he'd given her.  She still has a bag labled "Neurocollette's money" next to her bed in Coveld's mansion.  As a Neurocollared slave, however, she has little use for it.

	At some point, Dr. Coveld ran into a larger snag.  One of his regular customers, an organized crime figure named F. F. James, purchased thirty girls at once for a party he was hosting.  James was somewhat less than cautious about who he boasted to concerning the slave girls he'd bought, and soon the police had several leads on Honest Jeremy.  Dr. Coveld himself closed up his lab and disappeared before anyone could find him.  F. F. James wound up serving a lengthy prison sentence for his part in the enslavement of fifty-seven kidnapped women.  The fifty-seven victims were taken to a pair of medical researchers named P. B. Bryant and L. B. Stevenson to see if there was anything that could be done to restore the Coveld victims to their former selves.  Bryant and Stevenson made numerous tests, and discovered that the girls suffered extreme trauma when the Neurocollars were removed.  It seemed that all the stress and humiliation of their enslavement didn't hit them until the programming in the collars was no longer affecting them.  One week after Bryant and Stevenson started their work, all fifty-seven girls were stolen from the lab in a mysterious break-in.  The next day, both researchers resigned their positions and retired to tropical islands.  They seemed to have a lot of equipment when they left, totaling fifty-seven crates divided between them.  No one ever found the slave girls again.

	To this day, no one is exactly sure where Dr. Coveld has gone, but there are still mysterious disappearances that could be linked with the Honest Jeremy slave trade.  There seems to be no way to tell for sure, as any other customers he has are much more cautious than F. F. James.  The Lira Deyasi case remains unsolved, and many feel that Lira will never be seen again by anyone other than her unknown owner.