There Goes the Neighborhood (Chapter 12) (Patreon)

Rachel seethed with determination as she fought to hold Sassy in place, even locking her leg around her daughter’s before the girl could attempt to shuffle her stiletto-spire through the wreckage again. For an instant the elder giantess thought all was lost, yet her compassion for the thousands of microbial lives her daughter had just carelessly snuffed underfoot like passing ants made it impossible to stand by.

Yes, things were looking grim, and the world was sure to view them as monsters after the way they’d spent their morning unknowingly stampeding city after city into paste under their slippers and flip-flops, demolishing stone-and-steel utopias like sand castles without a care in the world. Even Rachel was guilty of that much, and it made her shudder to remember her own unaware crimes, but the cycle had to end now. She was strangely reminded of when Sassy was a small child, brattier and selfish, throwing tantrums when she didn’t get her way. Now of course Sassy was anything but a “small” child, yet in the throes of her omnipotence as a being whose smallest tiptoeing footsteps could quake the planetary poles, she saw herself as a goddess.

“Mom, why can’t you understand? They’re… ours to do with what we want!” Sassy boomed, confirming her mother’s fears. The girl’s transformation into bona fide cosmos-touching deity in body and spirit was complete.

“They’re people, just like us, sweetie!” Rachel protested with tears in her eyes. “They deserve the same chance as us!”

“No they’re not like us, and you know it. Yes, maybe when we were their same size, I’d have believed you, but… I think we became this way for a reason! We deserve to have this, all of this, for ourselves. Do regular people even think twice when they accidentally step on gnats, or… bacteria? They don’t even notice when they do! This is just like that. Because everybody down there is so small you’d never see them, Mom. They might as well not even exist.”

“Don’t say that, PLEASE!” Frightened of her daughter’s primordial words, Rachel let go, which allowed the prom-ready princess to slip away. She stood in the thin puddle of the ocean and tapped her heels, setting rippling hurricanes washing across the coasts, though she otherwise refrained from crushing any other sprawling silver micro-cities. Slowly Sassy removed her bare feet from her high-arched ruby shoes, setting her naked peds in the cool waters and letting the salty liquid refresh the mile-deep fleshy crevices between her beady toes.

“All right, Mom. You win,” Sassy said, shocking her parent. “Just for you, if you really want to try to fix things with the people down there… if you REALLY think they’ll forgive us for accidentally walking all over a million of them before they blew up our house… then I’ll go with you. And become “normal” again.”

Grateful, despite her daughter’s cold ultra-confidence, Rachel stooped as low as she could without crunching any more countryside under her heavy soles.

“Please, anyone listening down there!” she cried. “All you had to do is reverse whatever did this to us, and everything can go back to normal. We… I… don’t want to take over the world. We’re not monsters, or… gods! W-We’re just like you! All I want is for my family to be safe. So, I beg you. Forgive us, and help us save what’s left of you down there!”

Rachel’s impassioned plea was punctuated by the eruption of an electric-emerald glow between both giantesses which quickly ballooned and engulfed them in an energy surge. Neither mother nor daughter could say whether this effect was a genuine attempt by the military to accept the parlay and shrink them, or an offensive post-nuclear retort to her sincere apology, but either way, it had the opposite effect the world hoped for. Mother and child were ascending again, and much faster than before. In stuttered jolts, they climbed by ten miles at a time, stretching so high that the intricacy of the topography below Rachel became like squishy tree moss, while Sassy could hardly even sense the deep ocean waters soaking the grooves of her soles, but not even rising high enough to submerge her toes.

Realizing what was happening, a deluge of tears poured down the giant mother’s cheeks to form a new major lake below, while her offspring cackled loudly enough to shatter every window along the eastern seaboard. By the time the growth effect slowed, their home continent had become like a tiny island: a flimsy raft made of dirt and lichen that could’ve been peeled apart so easily between their fingers, or more likely in Sassy’s case, their giddily writhing toes. The ladies were no less than four thousand miles tall, so inconceivably humongous on a literally international scale that they could feel the distinct curve of the soft breakable planet against the bottoms of their massive feet.

“W-What have they done?” Rachel shouted, burying her face in her hands. They’d grown well-past the point of no return, and she understood that at last. “What have we done?”

“Oh, Mom, it’s all right. Don’t worry. I’m here. But, I’m sorry to have to tell you this… whether you want to be a god or not, you are one now, and so am I,” Sassy whispered comfortingly in her parent’s ear, hugging Rachel and for a moment becoming the new guardian of their relationship in this surreal new frontier. She extended her nude foot with toes flared, euphorically trembling at the sensation of entire states crumpling in the crease-ravines of her peachy soles. “This is just what we are now, and I’m starting to think it was always meant to be this way, too. Now, c’mon, Mom. Come walk with me. Let’s show them all who we really are.”

###

Meanwhile, in the minutes preceding cataclysm, Albert listened to the rolling thunder of his bubbly “little” sister trying to indoctrinate their mother into her size-makes-might philosophy, and rule the world with an iron foot, yet Rachel had resisted. In retrospect, this was the only explanation for why the military might’ve chosen to launch an experimental weapon to reshrink the diabolical Sassy at the cost of further enlarging the more docile of the two giantesses, trusting that Rachel would be gentle with them. After all, a woman the size of a continent could do far more damage than one who could swallow the globe, if only she planned to act without remorse, placing every defiant nation firmly in her footprints, squashing and twisting them all against the grain of her soles until cities and civilians alike had been broken down to dust at the atomic level.

When the electric storm swallowed the sky, Albert lost sight of his mother and sister’s four-hundred-mile figures standing the length of a country away. Despite all the destruction they’d wrought, and continued to rain down on the ravaged cities below their feet, he still felt terror for the safety of his family when Rachel and Sassy briefly vanished amidst the glow. Though they were the largest and most powerful living things on Earth by a huge margin, and had already shrugged off a nuclear attack, for a moment it seemed the macabre nightmare was over. Then they reappeared, “closer” than ever at ten times their previous size. Towering hundreds of miles away in the ocean, mother and daughter looked to be crouching directly over Albert’s university. Their exhaled breaths whipped up typhoons; the slightest twitch of their toes stirred the oceans to a frothing frenzy. He saw his mother weep, his sister rejoice, and the world around him descend into deeper panic, right before everything changed, yet again, for the grand finale of humanity.

In disbelief, Albert watched that emerald aura overtake his family again, and while Rachel momentarily vanished into the glow, it was clear that Sassy was shrinking. She noticed it immediately, panicking as dozens of miles melted off her world-breaking stature every second. Her foot ascended into view then stomped with grief, creating a new crater lower than Deep 6 just off the opposing coast, while bouncing every pebble in America with an earthquake that crossed the hemisphere, thanks to the pounding of her heels and the drumming of her toes parting the sea with each fall. Gradually her tantrum became less costly, though, as she shrank back to a thousand miles tall, then five hundred, and even smaller, until her brother could hardly feel her footsteps quaking the country.

Wiping her eyes of tears, the prom queen roared at the microbe-populace below, blaming them for taking away her power. Albert felt sorry for her, though he was still aware of all the harm his sister had done, and the sheer delight she’d taken in pulverizing towns then whole counties and even states into gritty particulate no longer recognizable as civilization once she’d finished working it all into the supple grooves of her sole creases and toe divots. No matter what she’d done, three-hundred-mile-tall Sassy was still his kin, and when he noticed her gaze miraculously fixing on the general geographic location of his university, his heart caught in his throat.

“Albert? Are you down there? I know where your school is… sort of. Please, help me!” Sassy squealed. “I’m coming to find you!”