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]

Adana nods. She snuggles Cam. "I mean, none of us are planning to die soon, so you've got time."

[from_scratch]

"...I was 22, recall."

[ask_nicely]

"... Good point. I will ask them both to hear me out and summon a fairy."

[from_scratch]

"Yup. In, out, thank you for your fifteen seconds mister or miss fairy."

[ask_nicely]

She nods. "That's all it takes to count as a summoner?"

[from_scratch]

"I think so. My parents haven't encountered anyone in Limbo who remembers doing even that much."

[ask_nicely]

Adana smiles a little. "Okay, that makes it a bit better. I mean - two out of three chance that they will be in either Heaven or Hell, so - one of us would have someone there, probably."

[from_scratch]

"I do think fairy people are more common," Cam cautions.

[ask_nicely]

"Well. Then they'd... Have each other, if they're both fairies? And not be stuck in Limbo?"

[from_scratch]

Cam nods. "It's not an ideal setup, but Limbo's kind of - disappointing. There aren't enough concordances."

[ask_nicely]

"How often do they occur?"

[from_scratch]

"It's regular but doesn't match up to mortal sidereal time, but approximately every twelve years per pair of worlds. Hell gets Fairyland and Limbo on approximately opposite schedules, so I get to try collecting and sending letters and packages to my parents every six years ish and actually succeed every ten on average."

[ask_nicely]

She winces. "... I'm sorry," she says. "That sounds terrible."

[from_scratch]

"It's not ideal. It's not terrible either though. At least I can get in touch with them and they know where I am and that I'm okay."

[ask_nicely]

"True, but - still. I'll look into summoning people from Limbo, and if possible... Want to have a tearful reunion?"

[from_scratch]

"I will probably decline to personally cry, and my dad probably wouldn't either, but my mom can turn on the waterworks for all of us, I suppose."

[ask_nicely]

Adana giggles. "Okay. One third tearful reunion and the other two thirds manly stoicism."

[from_scratch]

Cam snorts.

[ask_nicely]

"So what sorts of things did you try on summoning people from Limbo? I can work off of that and try different angles."

[from_scratch]

Cam makes a tidy booklet of experimental notes and hands it over.

[ask_nicely]

"Ooo!" she says, and then she is reading the booklet of experimental notes.

"Okay, there are some things I can try, and I can talk to more experienced summoners about different methods, too."

[from_scratch]

"The revelation of limbo does kind of suggest the revelation about souls, so maybe be a little discreet with it. Unless you determine that you can in fact resurrect the dead, in which case I support going completely nuts with it right away and getting lots of summoner-hours on the project."

[ask_nicely]

"Right, I wouldn't ask on a public extranet forum or something, I would pretend to be asking about summoning fairies or something and then use that in the case of Limbo. Unless I actually manage it, in which case, I will happily cause lots and lots of tearful or stoic reunions."

[from_scratch]

Cam smiles. And hugs her.

[ask_nicely]

She hugs him back, smiling. "It has been added to my long, long list of projects. I'm starting to think that list will just be endless and I'll be working on it for the rest of eternity."