A Tale of Little Cities (Chapter 14) (Patreon)

“What are we going to do?” Laura gasped, hyperventilating, with both hands clasped to her cheeks. She looked almost hysterical, terrified of budging her sneakers another inch from where she’d last placed them in the mysterious silver-flecked terrain. Meanwhile, Tara appeared perfectly content with the knowledge that she and her friend had just swelled into sky-reaching giants. The devious brunette’s smile widened, her fingers waggling in anticipation of scooping up another handful of sparkling city-pulp like diamond sand, but she restrained herself, given Laura’s obvious distress.

“Um, well first of all, you should calm down, girl,” Tara snickered. “Freaking out isn’t going to get us anywhere. We just have to chill out, you know what I mean? Relax.”
 “Relax?” Laura frantically repeated. “How can I relax, when my dad’s machine malfunctioned and made us into… MONSTERS?”

“Hey, speak for yourself,” Tara scoffed. “I’m way too hot to be a monster.”

“Oh God, all… all the things I just walked right over, without even thinking… they’re just gone! Because of me,” Laura moaned, practically in tears now. She turned away from her friend in her state of depression, careful to only place her sneaker treads on craters she’d already trampled into the earth, thus not contributing even more casualties to the death toll the gentle blonde had unknowingly caused simply by strolling in her BFF’s direction and mashing them into the rubber soles. “How could I DO THAT? Um, hello? Can anyone down there hear me? PLEASE, I’m SO sorry about what just happened! We had no idea! If… anyone can understand what I’m saying, I’m begging you, please try to find my dad, Dr. Weaver! He can fix all this, I promise!”

With her tortured friend distracted in the other direction, Tara happily continued rhythmically scrunching her naked sun-glazed toes over the remains of their former hometown, letting the annihilated urban texture crunch and then ooze its way up between the doughy crevices of her digits. She was on the verge of moaning now herself, though obviously for much different and happier reasons than Laura, but she kindly kept her volume down while enjoying the sensation of the buildings, streets, and microscopic citizens being squeezed up along the sensitive fleshy canals of her foot-wrinkles. Her sole was receiving a similar spa treatment, caking the creases full of crushed metropolitan blocks, especially when she thudded her bare arch down on the miniature architectural sprawl and kept on grinding the buildings into dust, all of which to her looked like little more than blades of low-cut grass painted gray and beige. By the time she was done, however, it was more like a fine powder.

Meanwhile Laura, knowing it was entirely possible her hopeless appeals to the poor little people below might have only translated to ear-shattering thunderclaps, considering how unspeakably colossal she was now compared to them, kept on trying to make amends. Again she chose only to stand in places she’d already stamped canyons into the planet’s crust, feeling deeply remorseful for every life she’d personally snuffed down there and earlier when a city was transported inside her shoe to be mulched.

“Hello? HELLO? Oh, God, this is all such a mess… I never wanted any of this to happen. I want to help clean up what we’ve done, save people, if I can… but I don’t know how. You’re all just so, so small. Please, Daddy, if you can hear me, fix this!” she cried, feeling worse than she ever had before.

Unbeknownst to Laura, of course, Tara was still having the time of her life, smearing her bare feet in all directions just achingly slow enough to feel the individual splinter-sized skyscrapers bending and cracking under her toe arches.

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For the counties below the feet of these astronomic co-eds, life had turned to brutal chaos, direr even than Laura was expressing in her tearful shock. Ironically, her first steps were much more apocalyptic than Tara’s, since the uniform shape of Laura’s firm-bottomed sneakers, except for the zigzagging treads, ensured that everything below her, from porta-potties to hundred-story high-rises, was reduced to flat smoking rubble when her shoe compressed down.

Countless people found themselves swallowed by an early night when they looked up between the rooftops and saw the intricate patterns of the white underbelly sculpted into Laura’s dirty sneaker. They saw the rubber topography swoop past them, then come into sharper detail when it began to lower, swiftly, as she prepared to step on them without realizing they were there. Screams filled the streets, cars crashed into one another, and warning fires were lit in final hopes of alerting the monolithic shoe’s golden-haired owner, but none of these passionate efforts mattered when, a second later, everyone in a mile radius was snuffed to nothing, crammed like ash into the angular divots under Laura’s shoes.

Tara, meanwhile, didn’t raise as much calamity to start, since she chose to remain seated and remove her shoes, merely nudging her toes peacefully through the stone-and-steel prickles and laughing at its pampering effect. Although this meant her mountainous digits bowled through whole suburbs at a time, it was at least not as violent a gesture compared to Laura’s terrifying march. The people below the brunette’s chosen playground had the chance to actually observe their beautiful destroyer before she stamped them, since she hunched out of the clouds and reclined where they could see her. The view didn’t last long for many, however, as the fleshy bronze-tan gridlines of Tara’s oily summer sole quickly replaced their vantages. Sunlight still trickled in between her thick writhing toes, ensuring the hopeless people below could see precisely what was about to happen, as all ten digits descended greedily toward the puny civilization. Each padded tip of Tara’s dancing toes mashed gradually into the sprawl, sweeping debris together under the arches, and getting cars and civilians lost in the spiraled grooves of her toeprints.

That was the case until the girls discovered what was happening, at which point their roles reversed; Laura became a more benevolent accidental goddess, halting her unknown rampage, while Tara eagerly continued toying with the city like her personal science project. The titanic blonde’s hurricane voice had indeed reached the city, right when nearby armed forces reserves were amassing to assault the four primary sites of the giantesses’ devastation, one set of enormous feet clad in pink-laced trainers and the other pair nude as a day at the beach, but they were given pause while military higher-ups interpreted her seemingly sorrowful words. A fleet of jets was given the go-ahead to make contact, so they zoomed into the sky, planning to fly up into Laura’s ear and project a message via loudspeaker.

This plan was almost immediately foiled, however, when the apologetic giant took another step back the way she’d come. Although no more civilians were harmed during her anxious pacing, since she strategically placed her shoes back only upon smushed-down tracks where she’d already squished the population into grit, the squadron wasn’t so fortunate. Several planes were caught when Laura’s shoe came crashing back down, either rebounding hard off the unforgiving rubber ceiling, or becoming lost in the trenches of her carved treads; those that made it past the humongous obstacle of her traveling foot instead had to contend with the girl’s leg thrusting forth to stride, as well as the rest of her gorgeous but deadly silhouette the size of a landscape unto itself driving through airspace. In short order, the entire fleet sent to speak to Laura was decimated under her shoes and exploded along her body, of course without her knowledge.

Plan B, then, was put into effect, when the army and air force launched a full-scale counterattack on both girls, leading the charge first at their feet, before any more innocents could be powderized beneath their lethally-heavy soles. Planes led strafing runs along Laura’s sneakers while she walked, doing little more than singeing threads of her shoelaces with their highest-caliber missiles; meanwhile, artillery guns filled the sky with whizzing metal in the direction of Tara’s bare soles, though this too proved fruitless.

The giggling troublemaker was really getting into the fun now, scraping her high-arched tan feet and squirming toe-shafts through whatever untouched pieces of city life she could find and had yet to massage into her skin like lotion. Soon all military fire was concentrated on Tara instead, with bombs dropped by the ton from every angle on her heels and toes, yet not a one could dent her, let alone even force the giantess to notice what was happening. Unbothered, she seemed to go right on doing whatever she liked, which meant sliding her feet one a time like living tidal waves over the countryside, toes flared to collect the flaming wreckage of buildings, vehicles, and pleading humanity in those squishy valleys between while letting the rest gush underneath to be kneaded into paste by her soles.

Soon the geography itself was altered, with half the city wiped clean off the map and replaced by muddy splotches in the rounded shapes of Tara’s busy feet. She was working harder now to dismantle, furrowing her brow while seemingly intent on remolding everything below her into a clay-like mess, with the only signs of the town that once stood there being building chunks scattered like cake sprinkles among the filth and in the marshmallowy spaces between her pedicured toes. Tara grinned at her handiwork, or rather footwork, and arched both peds high above the expansive ground zero. She flexed her soles, so hundreds of roads, offices, and occupied houses were shaken loose like unwanted grains of sand with each flick of her toes.

“You guys sure squish great,” Tara whispered at the land below her, chilling to the bone whatever survivors still remained, before her spacious feet arose again to ruthlessly claim another patch of land. “I wish I had a place like this inside all of my shoes… but I guess this will just have to do for now.”