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

[aestrix]

There is a summon. It's specifically for him. It's not from Adana, but - maybe it's Zane or her father?

[from_scratch]

Cam goes.

[aestrix]

It is not Adana. It's the summoner that she was talking to.

But he can talk, he's not gagged. He can't do anything else, but he can talk.

"What," says the summoner, "did you do to Mars?"

[from_scratch]

"Where's Adana, is she okay, did you kill her -"

[aestrix]

"What do you care?" she snorts. "Don't play games, I know what demons are like, I've summoned them before. What did you do to Mars?!"

[from_scratch]

"I'll give you my notes on the project if you'll tell me what happened to Adana."

[aestrix]

"... Deal. Hand them over, first."

[from_scratch]

"Make it a task and we can do it in that order, but I don't fucking trust you, I think you murdered my girlfriend."

[aestrix]

She looks at him coldly. "Fine. It's a task. Notes, hand them over."

[from_scratch]

He conjures up a paper copy of his outline of tasks for working on Mars.

[aestrix]

She takes them.

"It was not, legally, murder. You were an inch away from going rogue. She was irresponsible. Thank you for the notes."

And then she starts dismissing Cam.

[from_scratch]

"Wait - please let me talk to her brother or something -"

[aestrix]

"No."

[from_scratch]

"Or her dad. Fifteen seconds on a comm with either one. Mars still exists and you saw how loose my binding was I'm obviously not going to hurt anything I had the chance -"

[aestrix]

"No," she says, coldly.

And then Cam is back at his house.

[from_scratch]

Fuck. Fuck, he should have held back the notes. Or just blurted out the secret - bitch or not, she might have told somebody - fuck.

Cam adds a page of letter to the stack.

[aestrix]

There are other summons. But none of them are specific to him.

[from_scratch]

He ignores them for about a year.

Then he starts taking them again.

Maybe someone will let him talk. Or leave enough loophole -

[aestrix]

- No. To both.

[from_scratch]

Well.

They have forever.