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.
"Hi," she says. "I have the book list, I think there's not literally everything ever on it, but there's - a lot. A lot a lot."
"That's all right, I have a stack of books already while my computer chews through this one looking for stuff I haven't read. Time for me to -" He coughs and looks maybe too pleased with himself as he concludes - "go to Hell?"
"I have lots of lists. That one is actually a very short list. I have plenty of opportunity to say 'damn it' in my day to day life so that got checked off pretty much on day one of demonhood."
"Aw, I can't just tell you, that will ruin the impact if I ever get a good setup for one."
"Oh, fine," she snorts. "Go and be cagey, save your puns and use them as careful pun-scalpels."
"Tell you what, I'll tell you one that I have gotten to say, I have referred in real life to 'getting tail'."
She bursts into embarrassed giggling and turns a slight shade of pink. "Oh my god that's for exactly what I think it is, isn't it."
"Yep. Tails aren't as universally popular as the wings, but they're certainly a done thing." Swish swish.
"... Are horns popular? I can imagine that there's an easy pun for that, too."
"Horns are less popular again than tails - they make it complicated to do anything with your hair and if you want to get rid of them they're particularly awful to saw off - even if you make them totally nerveless, your skull's not nerveless, it's unpleasant. Sometimes somebody will turn up at a party with barely-attached hollow 'costume' horns but I think a majority of demons don't have them as permanent accessories. And as you can see I haven't added a set. So I'm not itching to make the obvious jokes."
She manages to recover enough from her giggling to look at him, then immediately turns pink again and goes back to looking at her shoes, giggling more.
"Right. Tails and wings both are mostly soft bits, if you need to replace them you go through tendons not bones - what?"
"I-I was distracted! I mean I noticed but it was really not the time to say that I was - embarrassed or - or... Something!"
She sighs, then flops her head into her hands. "I'm just - going to stop talking."