Time-Out: Phase Two (Patreon)

Never in Scott Stevens’ wildest nightmares, even from that first day when his power-drunk mother shrunk him down to a pitiful stature as punishment for practically nothing, could he have imagined the circumstances of his life, and the lives of everyone in around him, ever spiraling to this hellish low. Here he stood, technically normal-sized but having never felt smaller, more pathetic and helpless than he ever had as a one-inch toy crammed into Judy’s shoes or sucked against her inner cheek.

After all, there was nothing Scott could do now, no matter how far he tried to run or how hard he fought to stop it. With nothing left, the young man stood still and grim as a gravestone in front of the family’s customized mega-sized house, side-by-side with his two younger siblings. Maggie and Kyle looked almost as anxious as Scott, though of course no one on Earth looked quite as tense as him, for no one else could fully grasp the extent of Judy’s omnipotence-chasing mania except the one person who’d spent his youth as the sole object of her overpowering fantasies, before she decided to include the rest of the world.

Judy Stevens, breathtaking in her hundred-fifty-foot stature as well as her evolved mythic beauty and Olympian strength, made a magnetic display of herself, planting in the center of the field of their front yard with her hands on her shapely hips and a look of apocalyptic smugness on her gorgeous countenance. At the corners of the property, Techilogic machinery from the warehouse lab hummed with life and energy siphoned from the capital city. Scientists terrified of upsetting the impatient giantess and thus becoming her pre-procedure snacks scurried about, getting everything in working order.

It was almost time. A line of reporters gathered at the edges of the acreage where police barricades stopped them, and a massive crowd of terrified citizens waited further beyond, only present because it was made clear to them by their self-appointed goddess that anyone who failed to attend this event would find their house smashed and their entire families used to nourish Judy’s buxom assets.

“Thank you, everyone, for coming this morning,” Judy thundered to all of them in her most presidential voice, thrusting her arms overhead while her svelte tanned figure was bathed in post-dawn sunlight everywhere except those scant few bodily regions not concealed by lacy black undergarments. “While my first ascension was held privately in a facility, I feel confident now that you all deserve to be a part of my continued evolution. This is why you’ve come here today. To see me reach heights untold and unseen in all of human history, aspiring toward growth that will make my current height a childish pittance by comparison. It’s only fair, seeing how each and every one of you may well contribute to my betterment someday. Congratulate yourselves, now, on your important role in this achievement I will soon reach.”

There was something different in Judy’s voice today, even beyond her usual pomposity: an almost biblical quality. Against all odds, a few terrified yes-men in the crowd started slow-clapping. When Judy raised her eyebrow and nodded at the rest of the tiny faces in the throng, full-blown applause soon broke out, robotic and foreboding. With just a handful of words and a meaningful glance, the woman had gotten the population of a whole city to praise themselves for the fact that, at any given time for literally no reason, Judy was authorized and accepted in her power to pick them up, strip them of clothes and humanity, then guzzle them down her gullet to provide a few calories at the cost of their life. Many still silently cried, or guffawed from hysterical fear, but everyone participated. Even, hesitantly, Kyle and Maggie. Meanwhile, Scott shifted weight from one leg to the other. All of his limbs had gone cold, and he was fairly certain he wouldn’t notice if he was to piss his pants right now. Which, all things considered, wouldn’t be an unfair reaction, he bitterly concluded.

“I believe the time you’ve all been waiting for has arrived,” Judy proclaimed. She looked to the technicians at their stations, ensuring she positioned herself with both feet upon a the testing stage in the center of the yard. Projection devices were mounted on stands, pointed at Judy, and glowing sapphire. “Witness the next and inevitable stage in our society. You are all about to become a part of something greater than yourselves, something you’ve been waiting your whole lives to participate in, even if you couldn’t know it until now. But believe me when I say that this, here and now, is what all of you were meant for: to see me reach my untapped potential, and to think of nothing but my gracious mercy, until the time finally comes that you are required to sustain me in your greatest purpose of all.”

Praying for the thousandth time that this was all just a sick hallucination, Scott came to grips with the dark new reality fast oncoming right as the reassembled growth ray juiced up. In a rolling wave of power loss, the city’s lights fizzled out, except for the Stevens household and the great machine, then flashed back on at the same time that the beams concentrated all at once upon Judy. She grunted, breathing heavily almost as though in labor, but her weary sighs quickly turned to heaved exhalations, and at last booming belly laughter. In a tremendous blue-green flash, Judy skyrocketed, but not instantaneously; within a temporary bubble of distorted light, she swelled in perfect proportion just as she had the last time, only at an exponential ratio.

The soles of her feet soon swallowed the stainless-steel testing pad beneath them and crushing it like an autumn leaf; her legs, thick and toned as a marathoner’s, flexed and stretched upward to the open air with the grace of sequoia trunks; Judy’s washboard abdomen expanded, the shadows dipping slightly under each hyper-developed six-pack divot, with her belly button quivering below; her butt cheeks bulged in the skimpy black lace, quaking while tremors wracked the growing giantess’s body; the woman’s bosom, too, inflated like hot air balloons, her nipples pricking under the bra; her enlarged hands opened wide, reaching for the clouds with elongated crossfit-perfect arms, while Judy’s face turned with a vanquishing smile toward the heavens. In a twenty-second span, perhaps the darkest span of Scott’s entire life in an existence that had already included countless occasions of shrunken torture under this same woman’s thumb, the young man witnessed his nefarious mother rising from the now-paltry height of one hundred and fifty feet to more than triple that.

Scott, as well as everyone else paralyzed in muttering weeping horror, craned their necks all the way back just to get a glimpse of Judy’s face on high. This was a sight that her eldest son had experienced many times in his life, of course, whenever he was shrunken down to one inch tall, though even that immense gulf in size had been exceeded here. Indeed, at five hundred feet tall, those insectoid-people Judy ruled over stood at just over three-quarters of an inch relative to her.

Needing any excuse to tear his eyes away from his colossus of a mother, Scott wrenched his gaze in another direction, only to land on something almost as disheartening. A big-screen monitor, specially requested by Judy so the onlookers could know the precise value of this next stage in her empowerment, displayed comparative figures from her prior stature to this new one. Morbidly curious, Scott scanned the numbers, feeling the knot in his stomach doubling up with each new piece of information.

Judy’s bare feet had extended from a length of twenty feet to sixty-eight. Her legs had soared from a mere seventy-five feet to two hundred and fifty, her arms reaching nearly one hundred and sixty-two feet from forty-eight. That superhuman model-silhouette had enlarged and sculpted itself to a staggering two-hundred-and-seventy-four-foot circumstance for Judy’s jiggly planetary bust, her narrowed waist to one hundred and seventy-six, and two hundred and thirty-nine feet around those ample hips. Scott wasn’t exactly a math whiz, and his head was spinning so fast it was tricky to make logical sense of anything, but he was pretty sure, in academic terms,

“I did it. Oh, I really did it, didn’t I? It’s finished. I’m… here. Above ALL of you. You’re so small, so insignificant, more unworthy and breakable than anything that’s ever lived. Oh, it’s more beautiful than I could have dreamed. I can’t begin to express to all of you how fabulousthis feels,” Judy’s cry echoed across the countryside. Her volume and tone were all-encompassing of the space from sky to earth, bone-chilling and blood-warming all at once. She really did speak with the voice of a god now. “Thank you, again, to all of you for being here to bear witness, and for the gift of yourselves you will soon give me. You see, already I feel hunger gnawing inside unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. And seeing how I’m now more than three times my former size, I expect I’ll be requiring quadruple portions to sate my craving. But don’t mourn for the greater number of you that will soon enter your superior and become nutrients to serve my every need. With the higher cost in food will also come a stronger, more perfect form of leadership. I was named the president of this nation, but I do believe I have outgrown that title quite literally, and soon my reach will extend beyond these borders. But… for now… return to your homes, your businesses. Your city. Because I’m hungry, and nothing less than all of you will satisfy me.”

The people took to this invitation even more fervently than they had the chance to watch Judy grow. Chaos took the streets. En masse they fled, many people knocked over and trampled in the crazed stampede of bodies racing away to their cars or even on foot, so long as it took them away from the five-hundred-foot-tall woman who’d just threatened to make them all into breakfast. Judy granted them a generous head start, waiting until the last body among the packed crowds had moved away from the barricades before she made her move.

The woman’s first step was perhaps the first time Scott had ever seen any human action earn the word “epic,” for the earth-shuddering, tooth-chattering, eardrum-violating thoomof Judy’s ship-sized foot striking the ground nearly made her son faint. Reverently, the three Stevens children awaited their mother to walk toward them, her footsteps becoming more violently seismic as each long stride brought those bulldozing toes ever-closer, until she stopped beside their home which now looked more akin to a dollhouse for her. Judy stooped, cupping her titanic hand in the grass before her children. Previously, only one person could comfortably ride in her palm, but now there was more than enough room for all three kids, plus more passengers, if the giantess decided to take snacks onboard.

“Come along now,” Judy said in her gentlest roar. “Get in. Mommy is going out to eat.”

From the wide perch of her hand, Scott watched in vertigo-laden disbelief from this fifty-story height as Judy marched out of the forested clearing and into the streets. Her gait left craters in the concrete with every step, demolishing cars and clusters of people alike into dust and gore. Judy didn’t immediately begin scooping up passerby like she hinted, as would’ve been so easy for her to do by snatching a dozen per fistful, but instead seemed to enjoy the effect of her presence alone on the frenzied public. Each person was smaller than her thumbnail, discovering in the insanity of the chase that even at their fastest sprinting pace, the five-hundred-foot woman could overtake them all with just a nudge of her foot, let alone a single stride.

If anything, though, Judy paid little direct attention to her downtrodden edible subjects. Instead, she took her children on a purposeful tour of the city. Downtown, they passed mirror-shine office windows where Judy could spot her visage in multiple fortieth-story reflections; she daintily waved at the citizens taking refuge under desks in the glass cage, where clearly no elevator could lift them high enough to feel safe. The White House, less than half Judy’s former height, was hilariously dwarfed by the woman, coming up somewhere in height on her shin, which she celebrated by blowing out the eastern wing with an “accidental” arc of her heel.

“My mistake,” she cooed. “It really is difficult, you know, for me to move around without upsetting some pointless little structure. It’s all so… beneath me now, isn’t it, dears? Like the toys you all used to leave lying around the house for me to step on. Well, I have to say, I mind it less now than I did then.”

The US Capitol, once more than one hundred feet higher than Judy’s head, now didn’t even reach the level of her breasts, and Judy visibly reveled in this usurping, cupping a hand over the roof and comparing it with the placement on her bare stomach. Finally, arriving at the Washington Monument, the giantess encountered a building that still outclassed her height by only a measly fifty feet. Scott watched his mother studying the spire, cocking her head, then reaching for it with her free hand. The summit of the building vanished in her fist, then broke apart like cracker crumbs, which Judy cast into the wind, before regarding the newly lessened Monument, now decidedly shorter than her, with gratification.

“I think it’s better this way,” she whispered to her children, and especially Scott. “Don’t you? And it’s not the last change I’ll be making around here, I think. Now. Who’s on the menu today?”

Even from this height, Scott could hear the gurgling howl of Judy’s stomach, like a bear’s winter-starved war cry, and finally the woman broke her fast, crouching and clawing her greedy hand into a cluster of two-dozen people pleading on their knees. Their screams, of course, were easily drowned out by the wild sound of the giantess’s needy tummy, and Judy didn’t seem to hear them as she tossed them by the handful back into her throat, either. Even if she could make them out, though, Scott knew his mother was unlikely to entertain anyone else’s voice but her own for the rest of her globe-dominating reign.

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THE END (for now)