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]

"...I don't mind you accepting my compliments but I think I do mind the understanding of the situation as being wink-and-nod type transactional, how curious. Anyway."

He leads her to the nearest way out of the dome and into the fresh breezes of Mars and into the shuttle he was using to hop around from point to point.

He flies her to a certain spot well out of the way.

He lands by it and leads her into -

a garden.

The plants here probably aren't going to hold up in the relative chill of Mars for that long, but cold can do a reasonable job of preserving flowers, up to a point, and this point has not yet been passed. It is full of flowers. Flowers piled on and twining around each other, forming archways, shaped into a gazebo; clover almost choked with its own blossoms underfoot; if there's underlying structure of some non-living kind, it's been thoroughly buried in blossoms.

In the gazebo hangs (from flowered vines) a deep and cozy-looking swinging couch, because he didn't want to imply the presumption of a bed, and the couch is the only thing not made of flowers in the place. Before it is a (floral) table, and on this table is a lot of covered dishes that look suspiciously like they may contain lunch.

"Did I go overboard with the flowers?" Cam wonders brightly.

[ask_nicely]

Adana stares, then grins and giggles a little. "Maybe a little, but this is gorgeous," she breathes. "You made this for me?"

[from_scratch]

"As opposed to what, using it for a photo shoot so I can pose for a wall calendar?" he says, putting a wing around her.

[ask_nicely]

She laughs. "It would make a good place for a photo shoot for a wall calendar! It's extremely pretty!"

Her arms get to be draped over his shoulders, because this is too cute to not hold him.

[from_scratch]

Snuggle. Sidling into the couch, which swings gently. "It won't last, these aren't really Mars-happy plants and I made them live. But it'll stick around long enough to have a picnic in it."

[ask_nicely]

Adana giggles. "It's still lovely and cute! Thank you for making it, how'd - did the platoon of angels watch as you made it and be really confused, or...?"

[from_scratch]

"They were really bored. I offered them books. They took the books and didn't watch me while I went around the corner of that -" he points. "large rock. And I had the design ahead of time."

[ask_nicely]

Snuggle, snuggle. "Awwww. Aww, that's adorable. How long were you planning this, I'm so delighted with it, it's so pretty!"

[from_scratch]

"About a week! Had to be ready when the feathery busybodies gave me an opening. I'm glad you like it."

[ask_nicely]

She laughs. "Gave you an opening to make an adorable garden. Hee." More snuggling. Look at her, being all snuggly.

[from_scratch]

"This is a test of the angelic supervision system. Had this been an actual emergency, Mars would have ceased to exist."

Snugs.

[ask_nicely]

Adana laughs so much that she nearly falls out of snugglehood. She manages not to, by holding on to him and laughing uncontrollably into his chest.

[from_scratch]

He helps! By holding her snugly.

[ask_nicely]

Snugly! How lovely. She recovers the ability to breathe after a little while. "Pfff... All of Mars, just - poof? Gone? I guess you could have dumped a black hole on it, huh?"

[from_scratch]

"That'd be the straightforward way, yes. Slurp it all into itself. I have no plans to do this."

[ask_nicely]

"I would be extremely sad if you did!" And then she kisses him.

[from_scratch]

"And that would be terrible!" Kiss. "I must avoid saddening you. I should be happying you."

[ask_nicely]

She giggles. "You are doing an excellent job of it, my dear!"

[from_scratch]

"I'm glad to hear it, angel."

He takes a lid off a dish. It smells spicy and lovely.

[ask_nicely]

"Ooo. What's that?" Snuggle, snuggle. "It smells delicious."

[from_scratch]

"Curry. I can make whatever you want, but it seemed less weirdly hesitant to actually have things made in advance."

[ask_nicely]

"Curry sounds lovely. Thank you so much for making it!"

[from_scratch]

"You're welcome, angel."

Snuggly lunching ensues.

[ask_nicely]

It is delicious! Also snuggly!

"This was an excellent idea," she murmurs, nuzzling between bites. "All in a day's work, for fantastic demon boyfriend."

[from_scratch]

"Have I accidentally ramped up your expectations, do I need to start planning to make you a roller coaster next week and a cave full of phosphorescent crystals the week after?"