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]

Nuzzle. "Awwwwwwwwwww. Do you need any such ideas right now? Troubling subtask of the badgering-Martians-into-being-less-racist problem?"

[ask_nicely]

"I could always use more clever ideas! I don't know what to aim for, though, what sorts of subtasks would you like to do?"

[from_scratch]

"I don't know, how obstinate are they being? Should we just do Titan instead?"

[ask_nicely]

"Rather obstinate. The problem is that my job's basically 'out logic them all and charm them into each other's good graces' which is hard to pre-plan."

[from_scratch]

"You could invite them to have me followed around by a couple angels who can undo anything nefarious I try."

[ask_nicely]

"I could! That's a good idea. Thank you, my dear, I've come to expect them from you." Snuggle.

[from_scratch]

"I am so pleased to meet your expectations." Nuzzle.

[ask_nicely]

Adana giggles. "Mhmm. Best demon boyfriend."

[from_scratch]

"Quite. Am I distracting you from important work or is there some appointment already set up to talk to Martians in the future?"

[ask_nicely]

"Second thing!"

[from_scratch]

"Ooh, so you could be quite costlessly -" Nibble. "Distracted."

[ask_nicely]

Giggle. "Indeed I can be!"

[from_scratch]

Nibble nibble nibble.

[ask_nicely]

Such wonderful distractions!


It takes some time to persuade the Martians to accept terraforming, but letting angels observe and correct mistakes finally decides them. Adana and Cam get the okay to head to Mars to make it live. She lets him know, as soon as it's decided.

[from_scratch]

Cam is pleased!

Off they go to Mars.

Cam takes a while giving it a large amount of breathable atmosphere first. It will be very windy on Mars as the air spreads out. The angels have nothing to do but watch Cam suspiciously as he pours out air and reads a book.

He fills the depressions in the planet that haven't been peppered with dome cities with fresh water and some appropriate microorganisms and plants.

Then he get started on non-aquatic plants, hopping from place to place by shuttle and making swathes of topsoil and planting them with temperature-compatible flora that don't need bees or anything, all ready to go to seed. They'll be importing the animals they want.

It takes a couple of weeks to have it done to his satisfaction.

And then, with the angels off his back because he's officially done, he sneaks a moment in a spot that he didn't plant and then goes and finds Adana.

[ask_nicely]

She's not very hard to find, she has been hanging out on Mars making sure everyone is fully aware that Cam is not rogue, he is very expertly bound, and that there is no reason for anyone to react badly. It kind of annoys her that she's getting all of the credit for what is essentially Cam's work, but she is tolerating it and relaying it to Cam as it comes.

Adana is having a conversation with the summoner who summoned two of the angels. It's about little tweaks that might need to be made as the planet settles in to its terraformed status.

"It might need a few adjustments, but it shouldn't change dramatically," says Adana. "Just import the animals in a reasonable amount of time and it'll stabilize itself pretty well."

Her companion nods. "Fair. You do good work, I haven't seen a demon used so expertly."

"... Thank you," says Adana, after a pause.

"You're welcome!" says the summoner brightly. "Just wait, you'll be writing books on how to safely summon demons in a year or two, we can probably manage some other planets, too, without the annoying runaround that Mars required."

Adana nods. "Hopefully. There are lots of helpful things that demons can do." She sees Cam, and smiles a bit. "Excuse me, please, I think he needs me."

"Sure," agrees the companion. "Gotta pay the dues, and all. Not going to ask what you're paying." Wink.

"... Yes," says Adana, awkwardly, and then she heads over to Cam. "Hello! I heard that everything's done!"

[from_scratch]

Cam looks at the person and smiles, unsure if he should talk in front of an audience.

[ask_nicely]

He probably shouldn't! Adana waves goodbye to the other summoner, and politely leads Cam away. By holding his hand.

Once they are out of earshot: "Everyone is extremely pleased with your work and I keep getting compliments, It's really awkward."

[from_scratch]

"Accept them, I don't mind. I made you something, can you get away?"

[ask_nicely]

"I can!" agrees Adana. "Just about everyone is pretty sure that I have to pay you right now, so they will not blink twice at us disappearing somewhere together."

She blushes, a bit.

[from_scratch]

"...I don't mind you accepting my compliments but I think I do mind the understanding of the situation as being wink-and-nod type transactional, how curious. Anyway."

He leads her to the nearest way out of the dome and into the fresh breezes of Mars and into the shuttle he was using to hop around from point to point.

He flies her to a certain spot well out of the way.

He lands by it and leads her into -

a garden.

The plants here probably aren't going to hold up in the relative chill of Mars for that long, but cold can do a reasonable job of preserving flowers, up to a point, and this point has not yet been passed. It is full of flowers. Flowers piled on and twining around each other, forming archways, shaped into a gazebo; clover almost choked with its own blossoms underfoot; if there's underlying structure of some non-living kind, it's been thoroughly buried in blossoms.

In the gazebo hangs (from flowered vines) a deep and cozy-looking swinging couch, because he didn't want to imply the presumption of a bed, and the couch is the only thing not made of flowers in the place. Before it is a (floral) table, and on this table is a lot of covered dishes that look suspiciously like they may contain lunch.

"Did I go overboard with the flowers?" Cam wonders brightly.

[ask_nicely]

Adana stares, then grins and giggles a little. "Maybe a little, but this is gorgeous," she breathes. "You made this for me?"

[from_scratch]

"As opposed to what, using it for a photo shoot so I can pose for a wall calendar?" he says, putting a wing around her.

[ask_nicely]

She laughs. "It would make a good place for a photo shoot for a wall calendar! It's extremely pretty!"

Her arms get to be draped over his shoulders, because this is too cute to not hold him.

[from_scratch]

Snuggle. Sidling into the couch, which swings gently. "It won't last, these aren't really Mars-happy plants and I made them live. But it'll stick around long enough to have a picnic in it."