Renovation

[ask_nicely]

Adana gets to work. She starts off with less in the way of money than she'd prefer, due to laws about summoning and counterfeiting, but she has a demon bodyguard who can make just about anything. When given something so obvious to work from, she will exploit it as much as possible.

She offers her services to every lunar colony that will give her the time of day. Most of them accept. Cam is instrumental in most of what she does, but Adana summons a few angels to help integrate shiny new things with the older structures in place. The two angels that Cam meets are nice to Adana, but less so to him - he gets the cold shoulder and some pointed glares and insinuations, but nothing else comes of it besides that. Adana keeps the peace as well as she can, distracts all parties involved with things to do, and they carry on without any real incident.

While fixing things is something that she's happy to do, she wants things to be organized in such a way that they don't need her to keep functioning. She has Cam make several factories, specialized in maintenance materials. Then she sells the rights to use them to companies that she background checks as 'not idiots.' She undercuts what it would cost to have them built normally, accepts several commissions to make other factories for things like shuttles and polymer repair gel, and has Cam build those, too. Along with those, miniature black holes are created and sold, to give gravity to space stations and the like. Soon enough, she is rich.

Once she has money to play with it, she starts using it. She bribes several companies into making deals with one another, hires more staff to do her bidding, and then slowly expands. Disaster relief structures are made, funded by her business in services such as extranet ports and factories. She negotiates the disaster relief's neutrality to international laws, and then they get to helping lunar colonies that are having problems.

Meanwhile, she negotiates with Mars and its colonies to set up terraforming. It's slow going, there are a lot of separately governed colonies to get to play nice together, but she makes steady progress. They should be good for terraforming the planet within a year. She realizes that she could just grab Cam and go do it whenever she likes, with or without permission, but she isn't anonymous anymore.

She becomes known as a demon summoner. A very effective demon summoner. Soon it's common for people to look at her nervously when she walks into a room. She doesn't care, except to behave extremely nicely, and play nice with all laws that she can. No need to make people afraid of her or Cam, she's got time to be patient.

True to her word, the binding on Cam is loose and pretty flexible. She doesn't stop being nice to him or treating him like a person just because he is working for her. Actually, if anything, she's nicer - cheerier, happier, thanking him every time he makes her something useful. And there's usually something useful to make, too, because she's always doing something or working on various projects that are all leading towards one goal - make the solar community as nice a place to live as possible.

Comments

[ask_nicely]

"... You were a summoner? Normal human? Or - something else?"

[from_scratch]

"I was a summoner. I was born in 1987 and I lived to be twenty-two and then somebody murdered me and next thing I knew I was in Hell."

[ask_nicely]

She stares. ".... Oh fuck, that was why you said you'd wished I was around a hundred and fifty years ago, no one let you say goodbye, fuck I am so sorry. Does - do summoners go to Hell, or just random people or - or what?"

[from_scratch]

"Here's where we depart from 'secrets of the universe' and enter 'mostly speculation'. Although I'm going to mention as an aside that my parents are both long dead by now, were the only relevant humans, and I have managed to get letters to the both of them via concordances on a few occasions - fairies are shit with mail but sometimes something gets through. I think that all summoners, on death, become some kind of daeva. I don't remember getting to pick, but the consistency of personalities - limited, but present - within types suggests to me that it's about some kind of personal sympathy with the magic. I'd peg you for an angel-to-be. But the overwhelming majority of daeva just appear out of nowhere with wings already stuck on - ninety-nine percent of them, at a guess, maybe less overwhelming among the ones who take summons. Your one angel might really have a sister who is also an angel but I'd still bet on 'they adopted each other' to explain them. And a lot of the dead summoners are a hell of a lot older than me and keep less thorough diary entries. They might not remember."

[ask_nicely]

Adana takes a few seconds to absorb this.

"... Okay. Okay, as far as final fates go, becoming a daeva is one of the better ones. I can - I can handle that one."

She laughs, a little. "An angel-to-be? What - what makes you think that? I could end up with you in Hell, we could cover up the tacky gold plane together."

[from_scratch]

"I'd like it if you landed in Hell, and have no track record with which to demonstrate the accuracy of my guess, but you feel like an angely person."

[ask_nicely]

"I'm not sure if I should take that as a glowing compliment or a vague insult," she teases. "That I am an 'angely person.' You haven't gotten along with any of the summoned angels."

[from_scratch]

"They all despise me. I liked angels fine when I was alive."

[ask_nicely]

"You are alive," insists Adana. "Just - with some cosmetic adjustments, reinforcement, and a large smattering of magic."

[from_scratch]

"All right, I liked angels fine when I was a human. The cosmetics aren't intrinsic to being a demon, by the by, the ones of us who land with human histories have to add wings on purpose. The natively demonic start out with them. I considered doing feathery wings just to screw with people but I decided against it."

[ask_nicely]

"Really? So the tail and wings were chosen?"

Pause. Inspection. "... You have good taste. But you could have made them black or a dark color, rocked the fallen angel look, if you went with the feathery kind."

[from_scratch]

"If I ever saw these off and replace them I will consider that," he says, spreading a wing and posing for easy inspection.

[ask_nicely]

"Wait, saw them off?" asks Adana, completely distracted from inspection.

[from_scratch]

"Angels have it much easier in that department, they can just turn theirs into their cloud-fluff if they feel like it, easy as pie. But I cleverly anticipated this problem and right near the joins there's about a quarter inch with no pain nerves. It'll be sort of gross but not intolerable. And there's a limit to how much it would hurt even if I hadn't thought ahead. The indestructibility relaxes around deliberate body modification but there's still a cap on how much discomfort I can experience."

[ask_nicely]

"That.... Is kind of horrifying, I'm glad you - have a solution to that problem. Have you had to - wait, no, I will not like the answer, nevermind. Are you okay?"

[from_scratch]

"This is my first set of wings and first tail, if that's what you were going to ask. Do I not seem okay?"

[ask_nicely]

"Yeah, that was it. You seem fine, but I'm now worried for your safety and health."

[from_scratch]

"...What? Why?"

[ask_nicely]

"Not - any specific reason, I am just - it's a different situation to have someone who has always been a demon to be a demon and for someone who was human to become a demon. Are you - happy? With it?"

[from_scratch]

"The lack of opportunity for career advancement was a bummer, but then you came along."

[ask_nicely]

That catches her off guard. She smiles a little, and looks embarrassed. "I'm glad I could help," she says, laughing a little.

[from_scratch]

He grins at her.

"I'm fine. Waking up in Hell was disorienting, but it was fundamentally good news. I always wanted power and immortality. And a little asking around told me that my parents were going to be fine too, if somewhat less comfortably accommodated. And I got a few things done before I died."

[ask_nicely]

She wracks her head for historical things that happened in the early 2000's.

Then she stares. "Wait. Wait. Did you have anything to do with summoners going public?!"

[from_scratch]

He laughs.

"Maaaaayb- yeah that was pretty much all me."

[ask_nicely]

Adana cackles. "Of course it was. Well now I feel like I am talking to a historical figure, though uh - you got no credit, sorry. History books just say it fell apart then."