The Neglectful Hypnotist

Doctor Keith Kuntz threw down his printout of The Subterranean, knocked back his last few drops of coffee and rose from the chair. He walked to the window of his Mount Pleasant office and stared across the road at The Opera House, thinking that he could barely make out the figure of Professor Niels Rauch moving about in his lab. Doctor Kuntz felt a great deal of animosity, and yes, even hatred towards Rauch, who somehow seemed to get all the breaks in life.

Professor Rauch and his two floors of cutting edge labs above the Opera House, was funded jointly by the Gunbridge Bells Ministry of Science and Technology and the mysterious, but powerful Steam Guild. He was at the end of what appeared to be a smoothly flowing pipeline of money that facilitated almost limitless research. Kuntz on the other hand was only funded by a small Japanese company and had to resort to, well, creative methods to finance his own research projects. Of course The Centre for Mind Control (CMC) was doing reasonable research into ESP and possible human telepathy, and Miyagi R&D, his patron, was pleased enough with the results, but Kuntz had far more lofty ambitions. To finance these ambitions, Kuntz had devised his own method for for generating revenue.

Of course he had many times been called a quack and a cheap swindler for taking people's money for a treatment that could never possibly yield results, but Kuntz just saw himself as a good entrepreneur. The fact was, people wanted to control other people's minds and were happy to pay for the prospect of developing this talent. That this was simply not possible, was a bit of information that Kuntz determined unnecessary to convey to the punters. Was this so wrong? After all, hadn't he turned what should really be a volunteer research project into something that gullible losers were willing to pay for? Wasn't he, in fact, living the capitalist dream?

Doctor Kuntz took another look at the Rauch labs, silently mouthed the word "wanker" turned around and walked towards the door, admiring the cobwebs on the ceiling. Suddenly he tripped over a large object and fell to the floor on his face. "Crikey!" he exclaimed, getting up and noticing that the object was a human being kneeling on the floor and staring blankly into space. "Oh bugger, I forgot about you" he said, kneeling down in front of the figure. The woman was Urina, wife of Trevor Cocksmith, chairman of The Steam Guild. He had hypnotised her earlier as part of her private mind control session. After the session, as he was zipping up his trousers, the phone had rung and he had gone to his desk to have a long complicated conversation with his PA, 'Reptilian' Gillian (so nicknamed for the condition of her skin). He had then retired to his chair and the newspaper and forgotten completely about Urina, who was still kneeling hypnotised in the position she had been in when she had 'serviced' him. That was over an hour ago.

As he began the process of bringing Urina out of her trance, his mind was already racing ahead to the Hugo Sex Kitchen gig that night at The Other Forum, where he would be pamphleting his mind control solutions outside of the venue. Lot's of punters there, he thought, and most of them high on Seraphim or stronger. Easy pickings!