There Goes the Neighborhood (Chapter 9) (Patreon)

“Wow… I guess that backfired on them, didn’t it?” Sassy whispered to her mother, then couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of their luck and the gift they’d now been given. She took a step back and looked hungrily at the ground, a patchwork of speckled green and brown like front-stoop welcome mats that nonetheless formed epic metropolises and forested mountain ranges, even though they were too small now to see. Gleefully, Sassy raised her sexy spiked footwear off the squishy ground, held it aloft, then purposefully brought her hard-soled red shoe and its lance-like heel stabbing straight back down into the vulnerable crust of the planet. When her foot slammed to the Earth, she felt it shudder and then buckle as though she was standing on a frozen pond instead of bedrock.

Thanks to the growth spurt, Sassy’s foot could now cover almost a sixty-mile length of crunchy terrain, and she delighted to think of the hundreds of townships and countless citizens who were spared by the stretch of empty land between her formal shoe’s spike and the sloped sole ahead, leaving untouched ecosystem under the red sky of her elevated foot. After giving those anonymous masses a few moments to comprehend their own fragility, however, framed astride the front of her shoe and a spike heel the length of numerous skyscrapers stacked on top of one another, Sassy smeared her high-heel backward. Her shoe cruised unstoppably through mountain peaks, lake-puddles, and sprawling urban architecture. Whole cities shattered to dust like glass on impact, not a single structure of stone nor steel capable of putting up resistance against the godlike weight of Sassy’s foot for more than a picosecond.

“STOP!” Rachel cried again, lunging at her daughter. Again the woman had to be cautious in trying to restrain Sassy, as tackling her would only cause the both of them to fall on the country, first causing earth-splitting earthquakes from the force of their megaton bodies hitting the ground, and next flattening a far wider radius than Sassy’s foot alone. So she wrapped her daughter back into a forcible hug and grasped the girl’s thigh, attempting to stop her from lifting her shoe again and choosing another state to squish.

“Mom, let go!”

“Sassy, don’t you see what they’re doing? They’re… they’re attacking us! We can’t let anyone else get hurt, or they’ll never ever stop! M-Maybe if we can find a way to contact the government… the president… then we can explain what happened, and apologize, and make sure no one else down there, or we, get hurt!” Rachel frantically explained. “Don’t you understand?”

“Of course I understand, Mom. That’s why I’m doing something about it,” Sassy answered, eerily calm and even smiling now at Rachel. “They think they can just blow up our house, and us, when we grew into the biggest things on Earth and it’s not even our fault? I mean, how is that fair? This whole crazy morning is just proving me how rotten it is down there. How undeserving they are. They’re scum, Mom. I thought we could be new leaders above them, and set an example, but they already blew their chance. They don’t even deserve to see me in my prom dress. But, I’m still going to wear it, and my heels that I know you hated, while I stomp them into the dirt: each and every one of the tiny insignificant bug-people who did this to us.”

Rachel’s face went pale-ashen with horror. She cupped her daughter’s placid face, realizing the girl was drunk on the power of her country-sized stature, and only getting deeper in her self-involved mania now that they’d quadrupled in height again.

Her previous plan to contact the government seemed so rational. After all, the president would want a peaceful resolution to all this, after so many cities had already been exterminated either by the feet of unaware giantesses or the growing house, and surely he would agree to back down the military force, especially after seeing that a complement of nuclear missiles did nothing except help make them bigger and stronger, not to mention set a quarter of the country on fire. Yet that chance for peace might never happen, if Sassy couldn’t be convinced to stop trampling the world under her shiny crimson high-heels. Rachel wondered if she’d even be able to stop her daughter if she kept fighting to take vengeance on the micro-civilization’s trigger-happy leaders.

“Sassy, you… can’t just step on everyone just because you’re scared!” Rachel cried.

“But I’m not scared, Mom. I’ve actually never felt better or braver in my life. But, fine, I won’t step on everyone,” Sassy sighed. “I promise not to squish Albert, since he’s my brother and I love him, even though he’s so super itty-bitty now that we’d never even be able to see him. Everybody else, though, is getting squished until I make sure they can’t hurt us anymore. So get out of my way now, Mom. I have a job to do.”