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

[questions_later]

"Oh don't give me that, like fucking hell this is consensual, he's a demon, are you - are you fucking selling yourself for resources for projects?! I will punch him again, I don't care what kind of deals you've made -"

[ask_nicely]

"Maybe," growls Adana, "you should actually ask me before you punch my boyfriend in the face!"

[from_scratch]

"Ow," repeats Cam, getting up. "Racist much?"

[questions_later]

"Holy fuck you let it talk!" says Zane. "Dana, what the hell, why are you kissing a demon and letting it talk?!"

[ask_nicely]

"He! He is a he! I let him talk because he is a person and that is what you do with people!"

[questions_later]

"Oh, and I suppose his magical personhood means he's not an asshole for extorting sex from you? The fuck?!"

[from_scratch]

"You probably want to handle this, like, verbally," Cam says to Adana, not really expecting a negative reply. "As opposed to via me putting him in a bubble till he calms down."

[ask_nicely]

"Bubbling is an option, but yeah, verbally," she agrees. "Hey, Zane! Guess what! He's not extorting me for sex at all! Want to know why? Because he is not an asshole!"

[questions_later]

"What, so just because you're enjoying it makes it less -"

[ask_nicely]

"We haven't had sex at all!" hisses Adana. "Not that it is any of your fucking business!"

[from_scratch]

"I love it when people who have punched me in the face know things about my sexual history, personally, favorite thing," says Cam, glowering at Zane and hunching his wings around himself and rubbing the lightly bruised site of the punch.

[ask_nicely]

"... Sorry," apologizes Adana.

[questions_later]

"Oi! She is my sister, I will fucking defend her from crazy rapist demons!"

[ask_nicely]

"Great!" says Adana sarcastically. "So you literally have nothing to defend me from right now! So kindly get the fuck out of my business!"

[from_scratch]

Cam sighs and continues the glowering-huddling-under-wings thing. He doesn't think his word is much good here.

[questions_later]

"But he was -"

[ask_nicely]

"- You're fucking impossible to argue with when you are being so dense! Go away, take a few dozen chill pills, and do not fucking jump to punching people in the face!"

[questions_later]

"Fine!" growls Zane, and then he storms out.

[ask_nicely]

Adana waves a hand, and the door slides shut behind him. It's a pity it can't slam. She would have made it slam.

"Are you okay?" she asks, voice softening as she goes to check on Cam.

[from_scratch]

"I'm fine. It'll stop stinging in a minute." He drapes a wing lightly over her.

[ask_nicely]

"I am so sorry about that. I didn't - think he would jump straight to punching, I should have - anticipated he would show up unannounced..."

[from_scratch]

"I don't blame you."

[ask_nicely]

"I'm still sorry, regardless," she frets, looking over his bruise.

[from_scratch]

It's visibly fading.

"He packs a serious punch."

[ask_nicely]

"He is very good at punching things," says Adana with a hollow laugh. "It's kind of annoying."