There Goes the Neighborhood (Chapter 3) (Patreon)

Rachel jolted awake again, her heart aflutter. In all the shocking commotion, she’d almost forgotten her surroundings, and instinctively grasped about the area around her body, as though she’d just woken up in her bedroom. However, the woman was reminded again when felt her hand digging through the sandy terrain of ground that was distinctly not her mattress, but was instead the vulnerable mite-sized civilization which used to be her home state. She parted her fingers, and watched the silvery crumbs of crumbled cities sprinkling down over her face. The ashen particles tickled her skin, and she screeched, nearly blacking out again at the mere memory of what had happened. Yet it was becoming clear that no matter how often she tried to return to sleep and exit the dream, reality wasn’t fading.

She and her daughter Sassy really had grown to the size of hundred-mile cosmic entities, along with their house, which now rested somewhere atop the puddle-deep ocean.

“Oh, God. Oh, God, oh, God…” Rachel rambled. Her shoulders quaked, and she curled her arms and legs up toward her shivering torso. Though her robe and pajamas kept her warm still, there was no defense against the knowledge that she was currently one hundred miles tall and resting in a long crater shaped like her body, right atop the smote ruins of county after county. She held as still as possible, terrified of making the situation worse, but Rachel knew the damage was already done; she was currently lying down upon the new mass grave of hundreds of thousands of lives.

Blinking, Rachel extended both arms to either side, but was careful not to let her hands touch the ground again, in case any survivors below had missed the primary impact of her falling body. Even from her enormous vantage, though, the mother could tell that the cityscapes surrounding her prone form were not exactly undisturbed. Most were blustered flat, as though a powerful air cannon had fired upon them. The intricate grey details looked as if they’d been chopped smooth with lawnmower blades, skyscrapers and all, for dozens of miles in every direction surrounding her body. All of it simply resulting from Rachel fainting.

Where had Sassy gone? Rachel looked in every direction, but saw no sign of her daughter. Granted, the heavy pea-soup fog still permeated everything further than arm’s reach in front of her body. What had initially appeared to be the eerie result of a power plant explosion turned out to just be the natural cloud cover, which looked more like wispy smoke to someone of Rachel’s immense stature. Unfortunately, it meant she couldn’t see very far.

“Sassy!” Rachel called out. She thought she heard a reply, and quickly silenced to listen, until she realized it was just the echo of her own voice returning. In that moment, Rachel gained a certain bodily awareness of her celestial form that made her realize how truly puny the Earth was now, and how easy it was to get a rebound from her voice upon this humble rock. The thought scared her to the core, though Rachel imagined her own fear couldn’t have been any worse than what those poor people down below felt in their final moments as they watched a one-hundred-mile-tall woman’s unconscious body descending toward them via gravity, with no hope of escape as they disappeared into her shadow and, finally, the deep impact zone of her slender frame.

Wracked with guilt, the woman reached out and grabbed her daughter’s cell phone. She shook off the crumbly green refuse of forests which adhered to the slick surface upon its meteoric fall. Then, with grace only bestowed by extensive yoga practice, Rachel rolled upward into a sitting position, without having to push off the ground at all by her hands, which would surely crush yet more innocents under the miles-wide cover of her creased palms and spired fingers. Finally, she centered her weight into the balls of her feet, and rose to a stand again; her knees wobbled for just a moment, as she continued recovering from the insanity of this scenario, but Rachel was now too worried about fainting in a different direction and crushing another untold body count of termite-human cities. She held firm and redialed her son Albert on the phone.

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Albert was startled by the sound of his cell phone ringing again. However, once he clicked to a different news station for a new angle of the miles-high action, he saw that his mother had indeed recovered and picked up the phone again. Sweating and shaking, the young man answered.

“Albert, dear?” his mother’s voice whispered. Her voice was fragile and terrified, which was in stark contrast to the world-breaking might and power contained in the giantess’s actual body.

“Mom?” he hushed, nervous of causing her to faint again. Though Albert had merely told her and Sassy the truth, he felt partially responsible for the fact that his mother had proceeded to faint onto previously-unharmed lands. Had he used more tact, those cities might not be dust right now.

“Oh, Albert. What do you suppose is going to happen?” Rachel cried. “I don’t know how to fix this. I’m not sure anyone can.” The woman held back actual tears, understanding that her emotions would not solve this enormous issue, but it was hard not to feel overwhelmed. For a moment, she started arching her foot out of her pink flip-flop, desiring greater comfort so she could think. However, just as her long toes were freed and grazed the Earth, she immediately remembered how dangerous that would be for any cities which happened to live right behind where she’d planted the shoe, and shoved her foot back into the foamy thong.

“I don’t know, Mom,” Albert sighed. He didn’t like hearing his mother upset. She was always so comfortingly logical, even if she could be paranoid sometimes. In this case, though, she was right; there was no clear answer. Perhaps there was no way in existence to shrink Rachel and Sassy back to size, which obviously meant the entire world was now in constant incredible danger, either from another accidental stroll beneath the sole-smacking flip-flops of the naïve mother-daughter duo, or worse yet, if the same growing phenomenon happened again.

After all, this single-burst growth had grown Albert’s parent and sibling up from five-foot-something to five-hundred-twenty-eight-thousand feet: effectively, they were ninety-six-thousand times their original size. If the process repeated itself, there might not be an Earth anymore for them to even accidentally crush underfoot; the planet might simply cease to be.