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]

"So you're saying it's my fault," snorts Adana. "Because I am huggable."

He is indeed hugging her. She is hugging him back! She considers him very huggable, too.

[from_scratch]

"All your fault. Probably I was terrible before I met you. Collecting souls and whatnot."

[ask_nicely]

"Mhm." She sounds very unconvinced. "Well, in that case, how do you know that I wasn't terrible before meeting you, too? You are also quite huggable."

[from_scratch]

"Ooh, maybe you originally wanted me to suck the entire moon into a black hole for revenge purposes, but then I won you over and you decided to have me save people instead."

[ask_nicely]

Adana giggles some more. She keeps being embarrassingly giggly around him. "The space station was originally designed to be the modern equivalent of the Death Star. I was going to be empress of the solar system, it would have been grand!"

[from_scratch]

"I could make you a crown if you like!"

[ask_nicely]

"No, no, it's okay. I have changed my ways, that's all behind me, now. Your hugs have changed me!"

[from_scratch]

"Aww, it doesn't have to be an evil crown. I can make you the prettiest tiara."

[ask_nicely]

She laughs. "What would I even do with it, I'm not going after empresshood anymore. Honestly I'm not even going for 'major historical figure,' if human society runs better overall once I am done with it I will be pleased."

[from_scratch]

"If I had not been murdered I probably would have angled for eventual rulership of some manner of political unit. I could have got in very early on space colonization."

[ask_nicely]

"Awwww," murmurs Adana, nuzzling her demon boyfriend. "I am having more reasons to hate that you were murdered, I'm extremely sorry."

[from_scratch]

Kiss. "It's okay. It worked out surprisingly well compared to what results I would have expected from murder."

[ask_nicely]

Kiss. "Well, yes, but still. I'm sorry you got thrown into retirement so soon, knowing you... You would have gotten a lot of good in the world done. Also, horrific early death, also bad."

[from_scratch]

"I would have done so much stuff. I used to let demons talk, I would've found a decent-enough one eventually and gotten so much stuff made."

[ask_nicely]

"Like your own space station?" offers Adana. "I suppose this must be a strange switch, considering. Going from summoner to daeva."

[from_scratch]

"It is a little odd. I don't think I'd have kept any demon around long enough to make a space station without going 'but why stop there?' and terraforming - well, Mars. Not that I fault you for your caution, you had more background noise about what demons are like in your history than I did."

[ask_nicely]

"I might have terraformed Mars rather than gone with the space station if there was no one actually on Mars, but I was also under a time constraint." She shrugs. "There are less problems making a space station that benignly orbits Earth than with trying to terraform Venus instead. It's an option, I suppose, but I think Venus would require an angel, instead of a demon."

[from_scratch]

"Yeah, I agree."

[ask_nicely]

Adana affectionately boops his nose. "Good, because I value your opinion and if you didn't I would want to know why and be sad if you didn't tell me."

[from_scratch]

Well, if she's going to say things like that he's going to have to kiss her.

[ask_nicely]

Kiss! Lovely kisses!

"I might try to terraform Venus if I run out of things to do, but my focus is fixing the things that are already there rather than making new ones." Pause. "... Wow, I really do come off as an angel, don't I?"

[from_scratch]

"Yes. Yes you do. Stay alive, angel, or I will have to miss you."

[ask_nicely]

Nuzzle. "I will do my very best, promise." She kisses his neck, affectionately.

"Actually, now that I think of it - it is a good idea to find some other summoners to promise to summon the both of us back once I do eventually die. That way, we're both not forced into retirement and can actually see each other."

[from_scratch]

The neck is a very good place to kiss Cam.

When he has recovered conversational ability: "Do you trust any summoners to do that who you know off the top of your head?"

[ask_nicely]

Hee. She'll have to remember that, for future reference.

"I trust some people that could become summoners, I mean there's no reason that both my dad and my brother shouldn't learn how to summon both of us in case something terrible happens. Dad would be more reliable about it, of the two of them. But summoners that I happen to know right now, no."