A Tale of Little Cities (Chapter 13) (Patreon)

World governments across the globe were already scrambling to investigate the vanishing of entire cities earlier in the day, and thus were even less prepared to defend against the destruction wrought by Laura and Tara’s feet. Not that they could’ve done anything to stop the girls even with ten years of preparation time and military development. A token few in their capital bunkers fired off missiles, but most of these weapons turned to ash at the ankles of the blonde and brunette without even attracting their attention, let alone halting them in their deadly march.

Across the land, a UFO girded in black-and-pink rubber barricades rocketed forth, cleansing dozens of neighborhoods with a simple tap of its curved nose upon the earth. Then the canyon-wracked underside came down, flattening skyscrapers to ribbon-thin dust in an instant, and plunging the surrounding areas into darkness among the treads. The seventy-mile deities’ legs could cross so much distance in a single stride, that the soon-to-be-destroyed cities went from serene to chaotic in the length of time it took Laura to pick up her Adidas-clad foot and press it into the ground ahead. There was no warning. Hardly a glance at the harbingers emerging in the middle distance ten miles above everyone’s heads, bursting from the clouds on high, and the victims got to enjoy the inevitable visage of either Laura’s powerful pink Adidas or Tara’s wrinkled naked sole incoming, right before it crushed them.

Dr. Weaver was driving home from the lab, his car loaded up with equipment to reverse the processes which shrunk the cities, when he heard the crackle of a warning over the radio. Comments were made about craters covering dozens of miles, and Dr. Weaver assumed his machine had accidentally stolen yet another town off the map. However, upon listening closer, he noticed this wasn’t the case. They weren’t describing the clean-cut geometry of his transport machine. Rather, the authorities were detailing destruction more ovular in shape and ragged in intensity, sparing some stretches of the cities in concentric lines and hexagonal cells, while everything else below it was merely crushed instead of teleported. The cities weren’t disappearing. Instead, something very big and very powerful had stamped them down so hard and low that they may as well have been transported away. Or, more specifically, two big and powerful somethings.

The scientist pulled his car over, and pulled out a portable satellite imaging device he’d acquired to help track the disappearing cities. Instead, he pointed the camera not to the European sites where his machine had already taken Paris, Berlin, and London, but to America. Dr. Weaver began to zoom in. Long before he got close enough to study the “craters” made less than fifty miles away from his own hometown, though, he discovered the answer to his burning questions. Even after he rubbed his eyes and wiped the screen, just in case a technical mistake had created an optical illusion, he saw there was no glitch here.

In the satellite image floating from orbit around the Earth, were distinct pictures of Tara, as well as Dr. Weaver’s own daughter, with their shapely bodies inflated proportionately to such an unfathomable scale that the diminutive cities below their genocidal shoes were little more than squishy gravel for them to tread. Tara was hunkered down, pawing at the helpless cities with her fingers like a kid in a sandbox, while Laura stood like a crane on one leg. If their growth was borne of another malfunction in the machine, then it was possible they didn’t even realize yet what had happened.

Just then, Dr. Weaver felt a tremor in the earth. That couldn’t be a coincidence. Still gripping the satellite reader, he hopped out of his car, and stared into the sky. The wind had picked up, and the ground was now regularly rumbling every few seconds, completely out of rhythm with a seismic event. Through the haze of overcast clouds, a shape began to form. The scientist pinched his glasses on the edge of his nose and squinted for clarity. It was difficult to wrap his brain around the idea that he was seeing an actual body part the length of a county coming down, but the proof was on the screen in his hands.

Tara was standing on one foot now, just like Laura, but unlike her far more compassionate friend, the self-centered golden-tan goddess was lowering her opposite appendage back toward the ground by measures of miles at a time, with her juicy big toe pointed directly at an untouched stretch of suburbia. All while wearing a devious smile on her lips.

When Dr. Weaver looked back up at the sky, he was watching a moon-like ball of flesh-hued curvature descending onto the city. Tara’s toe blotted out the sun, casting night shade across the visible landscape, and soon, it was close enough to him that Dr. Weaver could pick up every iota of microscopic detail on his daughter’s BFF’s foot with his naked eye. Oily toeprint ridges the size of lakes, pores like sinkholes, a creamy gloss to the freshly lotioned skin, and finished with a layer of sweat which, if it rained down now, would put Noah’s flood to shame.

Helpless as ever, Dr. Weaver watched Tara’s largest digit making thumping contact with the ground a mere mile away. Her greasy bulbed toe burrowed into the earth, revolving carefully as the girl endeavored to shove her meatiest piggy deep below the crust. Once she’d settled, the mirror-shine wall of her nailbed was the only thing the scientist could make out, but he didn’t have long to observe it before the ground began to give out underneath him. Houses in the surrounding block swayed and buckled from the force of Tara’s toe penetrating the earth. By the time she’d shoved it deep enough for the thick-skinned ball of her foot to make berth, everything in a twenty mile diameter was set aquiver, and much of it was collapsing into the swallowing earth.

With no other options, Dr. Weaver leapt back in his car and sped around in the opposite direction. Streets began to crumble behind him. He couldn’t go home now; if Tara and Laura had grown out of the lab, then there likely wasn’t anything left of his machine aside from a fiery stain tattooed onto the bottom of his daughter’s starship of a pink sneaker.

Which, of course, meant they had no surefire way to shrink the colossal girls back to their normal sizes.