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

[from_scratch]

"I thought you said I wasn't a pet. And here you are talking about petting me. I'm shocked. Shocked and hurt, Adana."

[ask_nicely]

"Noooooooo, I'm sorry, don't be shocked, hurt, and leave to eat a pint of icecream!" Hair pet, hair pet, big blue eyes that beg for him to stay. "It won't happen again, I'm sorry."

[from_scratch]

"But now you are actually literally petting me. How can I trust you when your actions belie your words?"

He's leaning into her hand.

[ask_nicely]

"B-But...." Sadface, but she keeps petting him. "But you're so you and your hair is fun to pet! Do you want me to stop?"

[from_scratch]

"I am but a wretched demon. Wholly obedient to the whims of my summoner. Pet me if it be thy will."

[ask_nicely]

"Awwww," says Adana. "Darling, I'll stop the minute you ask me to." She gives him a gentle neck kiss, and hair pets continue.

[from_scratch]

"I know, angel."

This continues to be a good place to kiss Cam.

[ask_nicely]

Then she'll just have to keep kissing it, won't she?

"Is that your pet name for me, now?"

[from_scratch]

"Unless you don't like it. Back in my day it was a fairly popular pet name, I suppose it sounds sort of weird now."

He gets kinda mumbly as neck-kisses continue.

[ask_nicely]

She giggles. "It's cute, call me whatever you like. Angel makes a lot of sense, considering."

Hearing him get all mumbly is extremely cute. Adana approves, and more importantly, Cam approves, so she will continue what she's doing.

[from_scratch]

Cam approves so much. She has a very happy demon wrapped around her.

"My angel."

[ask_nicely]

Adana is snuggling him back, all the while. She's quite happy to have him wrapped around her. Wings are comfy, and he's comfy in general.

"Yup," she agrees, punctuating with another neck-kiss. "No one else's, even, I am pretty thoroughly a one-person-only kind of girl."

[from_scratch]

"Ooh, monogamy. Okay," he mumbles into her shoulder.

[ask_nicely]

She smiles affectionately.

"... If you want to not be monogamous, let me know, I know my brother's got a - multi-person relationship going on. Or something. I'm not sure, really, but it involves multiple people. Not the kind of thing I personally go for, but uh... I'm not judgmental. If that's what you like."

[from_scratch]

"I am okay with monogamy, possibly unless and until our contact is scaled down to iffy letters and care packages every few years which have to go through nosy fairies half the time."

[ask_nicely]

Adana nods. "Makes sense. And if all goes as planned, that won't be an issue, we get to bounce around being summoned by helpful apprentices or family members. But if it is - I'm okay with it. Just um - as long as I'm not..." Pause, squirm. "A notch on a belt? Essentially?"

[from_scratch]

"My immediate reaction is 'of course you're not', but my not-immediate reaction is to wonder what that actually means to you and make quite sure."

[ask_nicely]

"Just there to - distract you or be a toy to play with for a little while, or for the most obvious purpose of sex. Using me, essentially. Please don't do that."

[from_scratch]

"Are you one of those people who objects to serving purposes like that secondarily provided I am also personally fond of you and consider your interests important? I'm good at a lot of things but none of them is - fooling myself into believing the list of reasons I might want to do a thing is shorter than it really is."

[ask_nicely]

"Nope, not one of those people. It's just being nothing else but those to you would - hurt. A lot."

[from_scratch]

"You are not nothing else but your secondary purposes."

He resettles his wings around her nice and snug.

[ask_nicely]

She smiles, and snuggles him. "And you mean more to me than your secondary purposes, too."

[from_scratch]

"Good."

[ask_nicely]

Snuggle, snuggle.

"I think I might like having wings, after I'm angelified. I could snuggle you back with them."

[from_scratch]

"I could make you a set right now, you know, although if you ever wanted rid of them you'd want an angel to do the patch job on the ex-joints. And it would get you odd looks."