ask_nicely | Renovation

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

from_scratch

"Aww."

Pause.

"Can I also kiss you if I want to?

From:

ask_nicely

That catches her off guard. She blinks a few times, surprised.

"... Um. Well, I am a little concerned about the power dynamics if you did, considering I am your summoner."

From:

from_scratch

"What, the fact that it'd be really easy for you to kick me out of your place?"

From:

ask_nicely

"The binding, too," says Adana. "I mean, I would continue to keep it as loose as humanly possible, but there's - I would still worry about it."

From:

from_scratch

"I assure you, if you resummon me in the future and you're all business and you tell me that the deal is that I can have one kiss if I make you a sandwich every day for the next decade or anything weird like that I will 'no summoner' you without hesitation. I mean, then I might be unhappy and eat a pint of ice cream, but you can't actually make me do arbitrary things."

From:

ask_nicely

"Oh. Okay, good."

She squirms, a bit. "Then... If you want to kiss me and you're not - with anyone else right now who might be hurt by you doing so..." Adana trails off. She looks at him, shyly, then looks down again.

From:

from_scratch

"I am not elsewhere committed. And I want to kiss you. What's the rest of your sentence?"

From:

ask_nicely

"You may," she mumbles, to her feet.

From:

from_scratch

Cam tucks his hand under her chin and lifts her face up and kisses her.

From:

ask_nicely

Unsurprisingly, she kisses him back.

From:

from_scratch

Presently she is being wing-wrapped in addition to being kissed.

From:

ask_nicely

How delightful! She will drape her arms around his shoulders so he doesn't feel left out. It's not like she has wings of her own.

From:

from_scratch

Yaaaaay!

Of course he also has arms. It's a little lopsided, that way.

Mmmmmakeouts.

From:

ask_nicely

She can't keep up makeouts for very long before she breaks the kiss and starts giggling, embarrassed.

"I'm pretty sure I'm hilariously terrible at this, am I hilariously terrible at this?"

From:

from_scratch

"Of the two of us, only one is laughing, so if somebody's hilariously terrible I surmise it's me. You are not any adverb of terrible at this."

From:

ask_nicely

"That makes me feel a little better about myself! Not any adverb of terrible at kissing."

She snuggles him. "You're not hilariously terrible at it, either."

From:

from_scratch

"Oh, I'm some other adverb of terrible, then?" He kisses her neck.

From:

ask_nicely

Adana gasps a little at the neck kiss. "N-Not... Not any adverb of terrible," she murmurs, shivering.

From:

from_scratch

"Oh good."

Mmmmm neck.

From:

ask_nicely

Cam gets a shivery near-boneless Adana snuggling him as a result of neck-kisses.

From:

from_scratch

Well, that is just tremendous fun.

"At what point in these proceedings," he wonders against the nape of her neck, "do I need to start practicing self-restraint?"

Nibble.