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

[from_scratch]

"It's okay, angel. I suppose you'd just get in heaps of trouble if I took off my extra appendages and you were caught with a stealth demon?"

[ask_nicely]

"... Only if you were caught," says Adana, slyly.

[from_scratch]

"I don't have a good sense of how big the risk is," Cam points out. "Also, I cannot snuggle you with wings I do not have."

[ask_nicely]

"It would probably get me thrown in jail. For the rest of my life. It's an option, and a good one, but uh - probably a better idea to stick to official channels as long as they're still being somewhat cooperative."

[from_scratch]

"Okay. Let me know if it ever becomes a good plan." Nuzzle.

[ask_nicely]

"Mhmmm," she says, nuzzling back. "I mean, make no mistake, it is an attractive option, you could actually get treated like a person. Huge bonus."

[from_scratch]

"I think you have more hangups about that than I do. I mean, when people do not treat me like a person I am quietly judgmental, but I'm much more concerned with how much this inhibits my ability to accomplish things, or I wouldn't ever answer summons and then where would you be?"

[ask_nicely]

"Without my boyfriend and possibly traumatized," agrees Adana. "I know, but it's still... You are obviously a person. So you should be treated like one."

[from_scratch]

"It's only that obvious," Cam sighs, "if you let me talk."

[ask_nicely]

"Which people should do." Snuggle, snuggle.

".... Sorry, you are the wrong person to rant at about this, other summoners have not treated you well enough for my taste and it bugs me."

[from_scratch]

"I mean, they weren't all bad. Just - nervous and less intensely responsible than you. I've had recurring summons from the same person before and I didn't exactly show up to those because I thought maybe they'd make a mistake and I'd get to flip them the bird."

[ask_nicely]

"Fair enough. Though it would have been funny if you'd done that."

[from_scratch]

"I never got the chance, anyway. String of ten shifts cooperating with an angel to make a subway system, string of four spaced a few years apart helping some real estate developer make apartment buildings, and if you want to hear about the other multiple-summons case I need to know how much you wanna hear about my sexual history."

[ask_nicely]

Adana gives him a confused look. "... You can talk about your sexual history? Why, what happened?"

[from_scratch]

"I built this nice girl's house, and when I was all done and she handed over my compilation of obscure indie music, she told me that if she summoned me again it would probably be because she wanted to do me. She did. I went. Like once a week for a few months. I'm pretty sure she had obtained 'how to safely have sex with a demon' instructions from the internet or something."

[ask_nicely]

.... Adana snorts with laughter. "Oh my god, really?"

[from_scratch]

"Yes, really."

[ask_nicely]

"Wow. Just... Wow, okay. I'm glad you had fun?"

[from_scratch]

"I'm glad she got me, there were - loopholes, in her safe demon sex internet instructions, I hope she got a human boyfriend instead of getting cocky. I'd look her up and ask but I'm pretty sure she'd be dead by now, this was like seventy years ago."

[ask_nicely]

Adana nods. "Agreed. I hope she was all right."

[from_scratch]

"She's probably a fairy now either way."

[ask_nicely]

"I'm not sure I can aim for 'girl you had sex with' in a summoning circle, but I can give it a shot if you're curious?"

[from_scratch]

Cam laughs. "She never told me her name, I don't think you could grab her. Open question if she even takes summons."

[ask_nicely]

She snickers. "Okay, I would have tried if you'd wanted me to."

[from_scratch]

"It seems like it would be sort of rude, anyway. 'Hey, former booty-caller, my girlfriend has summoned you, I wanted to make sure you weren't suicidally stupid seventy years ago'."