FFXIV Body and Soul

FFXIV Lacks Mind Control Smut, lets expand it.

This story is a basic ‘what-if’ for the storyline of Stormblood, where Aulus Mar Asina was given some more time and resources to work on his theories and experiments.

Aulus looked at the piece of paper handed to him with surprise. At first he was so sure he would be going to jail just to await his execution for his unsanctioned experiments. He had been busted, done deal, after all Garlean military doesn’t take kindly to insubordination of that level.

He didn’t even get to try on sentient subjects yet! Most he could do was measure the aether density of some animals! That’s why, as he read on, his eyes grew from wide eyed fear to wide eyed surprise as the document stated that Zenos Van Galvus appreciated Aulus’ inquisitive nature and that Aulus was invited to work for Zenos directly. Aulus had a hunch that he would eventually be appreciated by someone for his work, but he expected it to be the case maybe in a year or two, and maybe in some other order of events that would have been the case.

Years later.

The news from Doma didn’t bode well for their Viceroy nor for the status of the occupation of the far east by the Garleans. Even here, Ala Mhigo where Aulus has been assigned to do the final stages of his research, provided test subjects and equipment. And over the years, thanks to Zeno’s funding Aulus learned a lot.

Such things as:

-Aether of a being composes their souls

-Thanks to some subjects that were tempered by an Ananta Eikon, Lakshmi, Aulus got to study the effects of tempering. That way he learned of the Eikon’s aether overwhelming the soul of its victim and causing the single minded devotion to them.

-While the side effects of tempering made it not worthy to be replicated, it gave some insight into how the aether of the soul affects one’s behaviour.

-With that knowledge, using some magitek detectors and fine tuning the technology, Aulus was able to distinguish different frequencies of aether in a soul, first responding for emotions and later in his research even some abstract ideas, such as associations with what's good or whats bad and so on.

-That revelation led to trial runs on first sentient subjects that lord Zenos gracefully provided to Aulus.

-At first the trial subjects went insane and violent, killing each other or themselves. The conclusion of that experiment was that implementing fear and/or hatred in order to achieve obedience just caused confusion and adverse effects.

-Approaching the issue through positive reinforcement of pleasure and other associated feelings brought more…. Productive results. The subjects did not die, they still were not much of an use as rutting seemed to be what pre occupied most of their conscious thoughts after the treatment. Regardless, those could be fine tuned later and the new morale boosting initiative that followed was a huge success amongst the recruits.

-Another important factor was, that with more resilient test subjects, their souls, when separated from their bodies attempted to get back into their original vessels, which was an issue. With some work on things such as white Auracite, Aulus and his team managed to synthesise an alloy capable of capturing the soul, with some magitek reinforcement and tuning, it turned into a fine vessel to hold resistant souls to be worked on later.

-Interestingly enough, the bodies without a soul remained alive but the longer they were separated from a soul, the weaker they grew over a long time and eventually perished.

-Creating an artificial soul was not sustainable, as somehow an artificial soul implanted into a subject lacked the ability to express itself and grow, that needed further research

-Further research into altering behaviour through adjustments of the frequencies of a soul’s aether brought mixed results. Manual attempts at tuning one’s behaviour ended up with volatile results time and time again. But taking a sample from one soul and copying it over to another brought more interesting results. Once identified, elements of a soul such as the ones experimented on earlier but also skills and abilities, could have their unique frequencies copied and applied to existing souls, achieving a desired effect. One of such was copying the “echo” ability to Lord Zenos and later to Fordola Lupis on behalf of Lord Zenos.

Now, Aulus was so absorbed into his research that he did not pay any mind to the news of armies gathering outside of the Ala Mhigan capital. Worst case scenario, he would use one of the minirail escape tunnels, that is after his research was secured so none of the savages would get their hands on it.