"I don't know enough about the underlying issues to provide a solution at this time, but I would be happy to clear out the flood waters and make interim floodgates to prevent reflooding while I work at figuring out a more permanent solution to the underlying problem."

"...hm."

That doesn't seem like he's prompting her to reply, so she waits. Politely. So politely. That it is fueled mostly by spite is irrelevant to the results.

After a few more seconds of silence he gestures with a hand and her form starts floating in the air. Its text starts getting rewritten to become a work contract, similar enough to the one the house contractor wrote up that it's probably off a template.

Once it's done, it floats over to her for review. For all his flaws, Hades is at least straightforward: the contract doesn't employ confusing ambiguous legalese, and merely states what her expected work will be and what she'll get for it and how the final arbiter of success will be him. In more specific terms, she will get one hundred and seventy thousand gems for clearing the Asphodel Meadows of river water everywhere it should not be, plus a further five hundred gems for every twenty four hours she manages to keep the waters from flooding again. Should she come up with a solution that prevents any further flooding for at least five hundred days and looks (to him) to be permanent, she will get a bonus four hundred thousand gems.

"Hmm," she says, reading this. "If we're not going with my proposed percentage model, could we then work out a pricing model so I can buy water of Phlegethon for personal use?"

Because no seriously she wants to eat the parts of the river people don't want, it looks like it'd be a fantastic source of local power.

He waves a hand. "You can use whatever you like out of it. It's not getting any use now, and it serves me no purpose."

"You're sure? Okay. Excess only, and let's get that in writing, please." She scans the contract again, thinks about the pattern of people getting trapped in contracts here, then adds, "And while I don't expect to need it, I think it's good form to have an exit clause here. I give notice however long before quitting, deposit all excess of waters of Phlegethon in a place of your choosing, and write up an explanation of my findings in regards to the underlying problem for the flooding?"

He waves another hand to get a contract about her right to the waters of the Phlegethon written up, but he frowns even more deeply when she suggests an exit clause. "The exit clause is built-in: if you fail to deliver your end of the contract you will not be paid. What else do you want?"

Aaaaa this is scary she wants to sink into a puddle of starscape and hide under the bed but no this is important precedent to fight for.

"An amiable way to end the business relationship. I want a... a shade of grey between doing a fantastic job forever more and ditching without notice and cutting ties. If I do a fantastic job, but in a couple centuries want to focus on something else, I don't want to leave you and the Underworld in the lurch, and I'm willing to put that in contract form. I feel like letting me have all of the excess water without further bargaining is friendly enough to warrant a repayment."

"Hm. Very well. What exactly do you propose as terms?"

Contract details are hashed out! She's perfectly happy to give notice before she quits, but doesn't have a very good feel for what timeframe is reasonable between deities. She's also happy to help train or outfit a replacement if one is necessary, but thinks actually finding a replacement is a bit beyond the scope of her job. Keeping and updating records is easy for her, and she actively volunteers to keep track of the stored and used waters, by mass. Not written in the contract but still nonetheless hashed out is a tidy format to send him written reports on her overall progress, because while she can directly talk to him and will come when summoned, they kind of both have better things to do.

All of this sorted, she happily signs the contract and says, "Excellent, thank you. I look forward to working with you. Will I now be able to teleport to Asphodel, or is there a procedure for traveling between levels?"

"You've never needed my permission, have you?" he says in a huffy tone, but then he shakes his head and sighs. "If you want to do things by the book, you can register with the portal in the archive. You! Shade! Come show her where to go," he says, his attention falling onto Achilles.

She's being a perfect angel employee, so she only smiles innocently at that bait. The smile becomes a bit stale when Achilles is referred to as 'shade,' though. Really, Hades? He's your employee maybe try to not make a hostile work environment!

"Hi," she says, to Achilles. "Achilles, right? I'm Yvette, it's nice to meet you."

Achilles, for his part, is rather used to this. He'll peacefully lead Yvette off without so much as a long suffering sigh. "Nice to meet you too, lass. Quite a name you have, I... hope you'll forgive me if I don't think I can pronounce it."

"You're not the first," she sighs. "I might need to pick something more common."

"It'd be very thoughtful if you did, but don't feel obliged." What he doesn't say, because he has been doing this for a long time, is that a weird name that's hard to pronounce is hardly the worst demand a god or goddess might make of a lowly shade.

He leads her to the portal, and gets to explaining how it works and how she can register to it. She officially gets access to Asphodel.

"Good luck fixing the flooding, by the way. It's been a problem for... a while."

"Thanks. Good luck with, um." She should probably not bring up Patroclus because she was being a shoulder buddy when Zagreus brought all of that up and it feels really quite private and a bit like she was eavesdropping, actually. "Everything?"

"I appreciate such a blanket blessing," he replies, a little wryly.

And then she's off to go eat the waters of Phlegethon! Nom nom nom nom. Delicious not-lava, only some of which is stored for later. And meanwhile, she'll get to figuring out the underlying flooding problem and work through Asphodel in tidy little sections of no-longer-flooded. It's not like it's hard to make floodgates, especially with all of the mass she's got to work with from the not-lava.

(Zagreus runs across one of her floodgates at one point while running through Asphodel. He pauses for a good minute there, staring at it, but eventually shakes himself and moves on.)

As far as she can tell, this seems to be an issue of urban planning. In that there wasn't any. Everyone was just kind of free to build their houses wherever they felt like it. Generally speaking, the residents of Asphodel didn't want to devote space and gems to public works and giving the water a place to go. At best, they wanted to put their houses by the riverside. Then the line of houses grew too high and infringed on the river too much, without offering inlets or canals or deepening the river to account for the crowding. Worse, she suspects the amount of water is proportional to the number of residents. There had been a rather bloody war, an influx of residents, and then a decade later the water broke through the line of picturesque riverside houses and the place hasn't really recovered since. Eating the spare floodwaters is delicious (and she's never going to need to eat another star again), but ultimately not a long term solution unless she sits here, forever eating the spare water. Neither is the floodgates; holding the water there will just cause it to build up again. There's an outlet going into Tartarus, but there are too many houses blocking it for it to possibly keep up, thus; flooding.

Her proposed solution is a sewage and drain system, and cisterns to hold the excess if/when any surprise flooding occurs. A lot of the residents of Asphodel didn't build 'down,' so down is in fact available. The reason why this obvious solution hasn't been done before is because, well, it's kind of hard to make a sewage and drain system underground (or more underground than everything else here) when everything above is a bunch of houses, and the space between the houses, containing an overstuffed fire river that will flood into any openings the minute one's available. But she can solve that problem with her ability to eat things. And when they have something set up, she can assist with testing the strength of the system, what with her ability to gather and put water back.

There's a lot of Asphodel Meadows to get through, of course, but she's moving along at a steady clip and gives tidy updates on her progress as she goes.

But as promised, before she has actually fixed everything, he gives her the first bit of bonus payment once she has cleared all of the excess Phlegethon water of the Meadows.

Hooray! This means she can get a room. Set of rooms. Suite? Whatever.

Being the queen of multitasking, she gets her suite while still working at fixing the underlying infrastructure of Asphodel. She now has a place to hide under the bed in peace, not that she really feels like it right now. But still, it's nice. The house contractor does good work.

And next time she visits it... she has a little gift waiting for her on a desk. A squareish glass bottle with a metal base, decorated with a purple ribbon. Its contents look akin to liquid gold except they're slightly translucent, and they seem to be swirling lazily inside despite no source of motion being present.

Under the bottle is a little piece of parchment with something handwritten on it.

... Huh! Roomwarming gift? That's sweet.

What's the parchment say?