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]

"I would have been upset with you and extremely worried that you were about to go on a killing spree. Now that I know about Limbo it's less... Off limits, but I still don't like it."

[from_scratch]

"Yeah, I don't like it either, but - what I didn't like about death before was that I thought people ended. Permanently unsalvageable streams of consciousness. And now I know they don't. Killing people now mostly seems highly impolite and reputationally unwise."

[ask_nicely]

"Right. That's essentially my logic on the matter. I am having trouble imagining a situation where I would willingly destroy people that utterly, honestly. Send them to Limbo, maybe, if I had no other option, but actually ending people I don't think I'm capable of. It's more likely that I'd just - lock them up, make sure they have basic necessities, throw away the key and then ignore them."

[from_scratch]

"I think people who are purposefully living at the expense of other people living are excellent targets if you can't talk them down and don't have the wherewithal to lock them up, personally. But I haven't killed anybody myself, let alone destroyed them."

[ask_nicely]

Adana shrugs. "Maybe. It's such a situation that I don't see myself being in that it's kind of alien to me. I can always figure out a way to lock someone up if given time and access to daevas. If those weren't options I honestly don't know what I would do."

[from_scratch]

"If you're going to have a large inhibition, 'no killing people' seems reasonable."

[ask_nicely]

"I think so! Maybe it's easier to kill people, but I like playing life on hard mode. Where I have annoyingly crushing morals about everything."

[from_scratch]

"Do your morals in fact annoy you?"

[ask_nicely]

She giggles. "No. I mean, sometimes I get annoyed that there is such an obviously easy solution at hand and I'm not taking it, but the morals themselves do not annoy me."

[from_scratch]

"Good. Sounds, I don't know, itchy."

[ask_nicely]

"Itchy? How so?"

[from_scratch]

"Having a constraint on your behavior that actively annoys you is unpleasant. It's not intolerable, but it's unpleasant. I would know."

[ask_nicely]

Well, now she just has to snuggle him more and pet his hair. "I'm sorry, Cam."

[from_scratch]

"It's okay. It's itchy, not agonizing."

Snuzzle.

[ask_nicely]

Pet, pet, pet. Snuggle, snuggle. "It's still bad, though. I'm sorry you have to go through it."

[from_scratch]

"Well, I don't, anymore, I seem to have picked up a full-time job with a very accommodating summoner."

[ask_nicely]

Adana laughs. "Fair point. I'm happy to help, my dear."

[from_scratch]

Kisses!

[ask_nicely]

Kisses!

[from_scratch]

Yaaaaay.

[ask_nicely]

Very much so!



She nuzzles him, after kissing has gone on a while. "So, while I am thinking of things that you might want - any places from human-hood that you would like to revisit? I can tolerate Earth-gravity if it means you get to see your childhood home again or something."

[from_scratch]

"I'm sure the houses are both long gone - although my dad has a copy of his, in Limbo, he lucked out. I'm curious now what's there, though, can you put in early-2000s addresses in somewhere and get results?"

[ask_nicely]

"Hmmm. There's probably some way to look it up. I'll check. Houses, plural? Did you move around a lot?"

[from_scratch]

"My parents divorced when I was a baby. I spent most of my time with my mom, but I visited Charlie summers and moved in with him when I was seventeen because Renée moved to Jacksonville to be with her second husband. So there's a house in Forks, Washington and a house in Phoenix, Arizona."

[ask_nicely]

"Aha! Thanks. I realize now that I know near nothing about your life except the generalizations. Do you want to talk about it, or hear about my life or something?"