Shuttles aren't due for another two months. There have been petitions for them to show up sooner, with supplies and extra O2 containers and places for refugees. They have been denied. Favoritism towards one colony over another would breach international treaties of fairness. Without it, they will probably reach the point where they don't have enough oxygen to support everyone. In such an event, administration might be forced to pick a district to - to stop breathing. Respectfully, with a thousand apologies, with all of their last wishes followed and all children evacuated from the area. The resulting casualties would be heroes. But dead they would be.
This is unacceptable.
Adana's a summoner, she does not have to stand for this. Fairies would be completely useless in the situation, and every summoner and their mother is summoning an angel to convert unnecessary items into plants or oxygen. She hopes it will be enough, she honestly does, but she's done more math and doesn't consider the percentage of it working high enough.
But there is another thing she could summon. Something that could just make air, or better yet - a space station or lunar colony that isn't lacking in as much funding as her pathetically run-down home of Bartalamos. She finds design specs from the space station Harmony, tweaks them a bit to shove aside the focus on 'science' and more on 'habitation' and adds lots and lots of places for hydroponics. She checks it over, twice, deems it to be better than Bartalamos, and then - then she is going to summon a demon.
Demons have a certain reputation about what they will trade their abilities for. To put it succinctly: a person's soul, or - certain sexual favors. Adana isn't sure if the soul thing is even possible, but she is not going to take the warnings lightly. She locks herself in her room with her specs and hammers out which is a better option: getting raped or losing her soul or possibly both, or hundreds of deaths.
Not a difficult choice.
She draws up the summoning circle shortly after, hands shaking. She is thinking of how to bind the demon to not speak unless it's about the contract, but then there's an announcement over the comm. It is about how every person on this colony has a duty to their fellows, and that if in the event that there must be a - Adana can't help but call it a slaughter - to save the lives of everyone else on the station... Then that is their duty, and they will be remembered.
Adana skips trying to bind what the demon says. She hasn't summoned a demon before and hasn't needed to with the angels or the fairies she's kept to, and looking it up would waste valuable time. If she's tempted out of her soul, fine, it's worth it, she'll give it up in a heartbeat if it means someone's mother or brother or uncle can keep living. She is careful about making sure the daeva can't get out or do anything that is not part of a contract they set. Nothing that she cannot get legally, nothing that is not hers - other lists. Other things, that she can't give up, that go into every summon.
(There is no clause that says, 'You cannot demand I have sex with you' or 'You cannot demand my soul' - Adana doesn't dare, not when the demon might say no.)
She finishes the circle. Then, shivering - she sends out the call to summons.
Then she realizes what is happening and wonders if there was another reason that demons are typically confined to two phrases. That's a bit of a terrifying thought. He could be lying and trying to persuade her to take off the summon's constraints.
Adana quietly decides that she will not do that. Even if he is being really helpful and is cute and shirtless and everything, he still gets to keep the constraints. They're not unfair, he can still talk.
Her face doesn't flicker in the slightest while she comes to this conclusion.
"Sure!" she agrees.
"I don't get summoned often enough, there's not much to do in Hell besides socialize and fly around and read and throw parts of my house into my black hole so I can replace 'em. All of these are fine activities but they aren't the sort of meaningful I like best." Plants plants plants plants. Many kinds. Labels accompany them: potatoes wheat tomatoes broccoli kale corn zucchini rosemary arugula -
"I can't, actually, pick up a whole living room. Some demons go in for enough body modification to be able to do that kind of thing but in my case it's more chainsaw it to bits a wall at a time and feed the bits to the pinhole and sweep up the debris and then I get to make a new one. I usually have a few layers of different sorts of wall treatment on a room before I get that bored with it, though. When my black hole gets inconveniently big I'm going to chuck the whole house at it and start again from a higher orbit."
"That sounds kind of strange, but also fun! Though it must be a pain to constantly destroy things you make."
"Yeah, the angels have one up on us for recycling. Hell rejoiced when the black hole was discovered. Incineration was the previous state of the art for decluttering. We're not pyromaniacs, we just don't want to have to abandon cities under heap of used crap every few decades. Although it's not like we have to wreck stuff, we could in theory even use human reclamation methods for the relatively garden-variety creations, just - it doesn't stay useful indefinitely and who wants to bother with a compost heap when you can just make perfect plants without the fertilizer step?"
"Incineration? That explains the fire stories. I hope you don't throw actual people into them? Or souls?"
"There are still a few traditional lakes of fire. They are empty of humans and human metaphysical parts."
"Also demons, angels, fairies, and their assorted metaphysical parts. I consider more than just humans people, I am a responsible summoner. Except when I freak out and make a terrible circle to summon a demon because I do not want people to die. Which reminds me! Have you made the comm, yet?"
"We can't really get visitors, there's no way to get an angel or a fairy into Hell. You guys get all the hosting privileges. No way to get a human into Hell either. If the comm was in your blueprints it is made -" He flips through the blueprints. "Yeah, all set."
Prance, prance, off she goes to do that. Cam is welcome to watch, or keep making the space station. Up to him.
She is having an absurd amount of fun with this. Absolutely absurd. She is possibly going to have something horrific happen to her sometime in the future due to demon, but she has probably just saved hundreds of people, so she doesn't care. For now, anyway.
"I don't care all that much if some random moon people respect my life choices," Cam remarks. "Are you going to want me to fly you back to the Moon in one of the shuttles so you can pick up a human pilot and so on and so on?"
"It still seems terribly rude!" declares Adana. "And yes, I will - but space station first, please. They need time to organize anyway, I just threw a wrench into their spreadsheets. Poor dears."
Back he goes to plant plants. Plant plant plant.
Plop. Adana goes into a chair once he departs.
She checks to see if her hand is shaking. The answer is yes. Yes it is. It's not like she's done this sort of thing before, she is kind of frightened. If things go well, if they go exactly as planned - she will be directly responsible for the health and well-being of several hundred people. Which is kind of scary, because if she screws it up, people die. And, of course, if things go terribly, she will be any combination of raped, soul-sucked, dead, or get lots of other people killed.
No pressure, or anything.
and then goes looking for Adana again.
"Hi," she says, still typing. "I realized that I will need people to keep this station afloat, I am trying to get a list of who is necessary and work from there."
"I was not expecting you to make me people! That would have worrying ethical problems. Uhh - aside from the shuttles, nothing I can think of."