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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.
ask_nicely
ask_nicely
"Um. Eventually, I guess? But honestly it could be replaced with like - summoning apprentice or something, it's just someone who is younger than I would be and therefore be able to resurrect me when I die of old age."
ask_nicely
She peers at him, confused. Then, it clicks in her head. Daeva can't have kids.
Quietly, she adds, "... I wouldn't need to actually bear them, if I want them, anyway. I'm adopted, it's not like I'm going to be insistent that they came from my womb."
Quietly, she adds, "... I wouldn't need to actually bear them, if I want them, anyway. I'm adopted, it's not like I'm going to be insistent that they came from my womb."
from_scratch
"Humanity still hasn't solved all the various problems that necessitate adoption, huh?"
ask_nicely
"Me, too."
Pause. "... But I guess that's not something daeva can do? If you wanted any before demon-hood? If so, I'm really sorry, that sucks."
Pause. "... But I guess that's not something daeva can do? If you wanted any before demon-hood? If so, I'm really sorry, that sucks."
from_scratch
"It wasn't a huge priority for me, really," he assures her. "Always a 'maybe someday but maybe not'."
ask_nicely
She nods. "Okay. That reminds me, if I get resurrection down I will also want to start campaigning for daeva rights, along with the resurrected dead."
ask_nicely
"Thank you! It has always sort of bothered me how mortals do not treat daeva properly. I mean, angels and fairies they treat okay, but I never realized just how badly demons are treated until..." She motions to Cam.
ask_nicely
She giggles. "Yes. That. Though I would want to treat even the nasty ones nicely. Because morality."
ask_nicely
"I actually have a long argument for why we should treat all daeva with respect, but I kept throwing it at my brother and he started summarizing it as 'Because morality' so - unless you want to actually hear the long argument, I will stick with that."
from_scratch
"I think I can probably guess its contents. Am I ever going to meet your brother or your dad or would I be awkward to explain?"
ask_nicely
"You will actually get to meet them, I have just been exceedingly busy. For obvious reasons."
ask_nicely
Adana giggles and says, "I hope I haven't been overworking you? I will let you have vacation days, because morality."
from_scratch
"I'm fine. I like being busy. The last hundred and fifty years of my life have been mostly vacation. I have learned six demonic languages the long way and studied a lot of subjects and learned to fly and learned to swim with wings on - second thing is harder - and read many books and now I get to be busy."
ask_nicely
"Fair enough! I am probably a good summoner for you, then, because I also like to be busy. With fifty thousand projects going on concurrently that I can bounce between at will. Let me know if you want to go back to being on vacation, I will still get things done without you, just a bit more slowly."
ask_nicely
"Good! It would upset me if you told someone else first and I found out through the grapevine. I would feel bad for doing that to you by accident."
from_scratch
"You are very responsible."
He's kind of gazing at her and is indecisive enough not to suppress it.
He's kind of gazing at her and is indecisive enough not to suppress it.
ask_nicely
"Thank you, I try."
She notices the way he's looking at her. Adana isn't used to attention from the opposite sex and doesn't know what's going on. "... Why are you looking at me like that, do I have something on my face? Or in my teeth? Am I secretly hideous and you just figured it out now?"
She notices the way he's looking at her. Adana isn't used to attention from the opposite sex and doesn't know what's going on. "... Why are you looking at me like that, do I have something on my face? Or in my teeth? Am I secretly hideous and you just figured it out now?"