There Goes the Neighborhood (Chapter 13) (Patreon)

It was ironic, really, for Albert to see his sibling crying out for aid, when she’d already demolished thousands of miles of urban sprawl and millions of lives underfoot this morning, but he still couldn’t turn his back on her, and ran down the street toward her. Even though his tiny human legs couldn’t cross much distance, Sassy was now on her hands and knees, crawling toward his city at the same rate that she was losing height, such that she appeared to be the same size on the horizon while drawing nearer and nearer to her tiny big brother. A sky-high pillar of smoke and ash followed in her wake, and Albert could hear the groaning of buildings and mountains alike toppling like dominoes as Sassy carelessly dragged her bare feet along the ground, bulldozing all in her path. What structures were lucky enough to be missed by the wide bulk of her peds’ upper curve plunging along the countryside were instead raked up by those bulbous toes, leaving nothing but ruin behind her shuffling soles.

Eventually, when she’d reached the city limits, Sassy shrank too small to be seen over the rooftops, but still Albert kept running toward her until he was out of breath. Finally, in a crater at the center of where the campus used to stand, was his sister, back to her old size and crying like she’d just lost everything she held dear, because she had. Albert rushed to his sister and embraced her, though the happy reunion was short-lived, as both trembling siblings looked to the skies to see that the emerald static nd the dust fog of Sassy’s once-deadly feet had faded, giving them a clear view once again to the great beyond.

When at last they saw her, there was only one word for the brother and sister to whimper in unison: “Mom?”

Rachel had been so overcome at their latest tenfold growth, believing there was no possible way their crimes could be set right, she couldn’t see through her tears to notice that her clothes had turned to mist in the electric exchange, nor the aftershock which shrunk Sassy, while siphoning that godlike volume of energy into the only creature large enough to contain it: the supposed queen-of-the-world’s mother. Over a matter of minutes, all of the loudmouthed young destruction-lover’s size, plus much more, was transferred into Rachel.

When at last she looked down at the Welcome mat-sized continent, she couldn’t even recognize it as her home, having growth by another two thousand miles since. She felt the fabric of the planet bending under her feet like arid soil, the bedrock and crust kicking up easily as pond scum when she so much as budged her ponderous foot. The other giantess was nowhere to be seen now, though Rachel cried out for her misguided daughter, since opposites though they were, Sassy was the only recognizable comfort now for her mother while standing atop the buckling beach-ball of Earth. As she continued to swell, though, the woman steadily found it impossible to be either terrified or hysterical at her predicament. The events in motion now were simply too cosmic to reach her on an emotional level, and against all odds, she was soothed.

The astronomically humongous blonde pushed off from the ocean floor, which was only deep enough now to gently moisten the bottoms of Rachel’s feet, kissing them with saltwater while her muscular tweaks and toe-curls rearranged the geography of nations. Rather than jumping and then coming back to Earth via gravity, though, the woman now exceeded ten thousand miles tall, above the stature of the entire planet, which meant that the world was pulled to her gravity rather than the other way around. Still, the giantess was stronger than this helpless little planetoid could ever be, and since so much of her now stood above the atmosphere, all it took to fly off was one gentle nudge from her feet, which were big enough now to literally push the planet off its axis. Rachel found herself floating in space over her old spherical home, now the size of a basketball. A distinctive pair of ovular footprints and ten toe-craters, each deeper and wider than any on the moon, were now brutally stamped into the planet like a concrete signature from where Rachel had achieved lift-off. She had become a heavenly body.

“Maybe… my baby girl was right after all?” Rachel whispered to herself, though even her quietest voice was sufficient to reverberate the wounded husk of Earth, reaching every pair of living human ears. She swam in the peaceful silence, turning herself over, until the Earth was positioned between the insteps of her naked feet. “We were more… I am more. And… I’m sorry, everyone who hears me now, but… you aren’t. Thank you, though, for this gift.”

Though she’d been unable to understand her daughter’s desires to lord over the planet while they still stood amongst the patchwork of greenery and ocean-puddles, as her maternal instinct made it impossible to wish harm on others then, Rachel’s views were evolving now just as quickly as her size. The object now floating at her feet could hardly be understood as a ball of sentient life, but just an insignificant space-stone with billions of germ-sized beings too puny to comprehend the majesty of the golden-haired motherly angel who now owned them and all their collective fates. When Rachel gradually arched one foot in close to the still-diminishing planet, while her body soared to untold heights in the hundreds of thousands of miles tall, then past a million, it wasn’t a difficult decision, nor a malicious one. She simply saw a blue-and-green planet the scope of a marble, and was compelled to absorb it into herself. So she spread her long dexterous toes, and eased the tiny orb of Earth astride the fleshy shafts of her digits.

She didn’t squeeze right away, knowing a clench at her full potential would make the world, all its people, and her children indistinguishable from stardust in the blink of an eye, so Rachel took her time. The universal giantess let the shadow of her pale creamy toes surround the world from all sides like a double eclipse, replacing the whole skyscape of Earth with the tender texture of her pedicured skin. Then she teased them, arching her digits in and out, each one thicker than an asteroid belt, but still didn’t bring them together and compress the planet into toejam.

A pause followed, at which point the world was hardly visible now, since Rachel had become so incomprehensibly gigantic around it. Not wanting to become so tall that she could no longer feel the blessing of the world’s pieces scattering on her foot, she flexed her sole and wrung her toes. All it took was one pulse and the globe split. Though the end of the world was delicate to Rachel’s senses, no greater a force than a cool breeze tickling up the buttery wrinkles of her bare feet, she still felt it nonetheless, and managed a genuine smile to herself.

Rachel floated in the starry infinity, prepared now to let her body literally fill up all of spatial existence, but she’d still never forget the sensory caress of those last specks of Earth crumpled lovingly in the vast galaxy-width canyon between her toes, with her forever.

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THE END