Bad Bet (Chapter 3) (Patreon)

The moisture on the eroded insole ground, not to mention the powdered dirt and fresh flecks of juicy lint the size of wedding cakes piled around the arena where the shrinkers now found themselves trapped, reminded them both of how recently Nele’s shoes had been used for exercise, and each deeply regretted the girl’s participation in that footrace with Tiara. All they could do now, however, was suffer the consequences on their knees, rasping for clean breath, while the titanic blonde gazed in at them through the opening above and clamped her nostrils closed to spare herself the rancid perfume.

“Wheeeeeew! P.U.!” Tiara sang in response to the plumes of perspiration mist wafting from the shoe prison. She cackled again while making a goofy face at her little friends and sticking out her tongue in giddy mocking. “That is NASTY! And I thought I had sweaty feet today. Well, okay, mine are still definitely still worse than yours, Nele, but you don’t even live on a farm like me! What, they got this stinky from one day running around out here? Geez, maybe you need to see a doctor or something! And while you’re there, you can ask if they have any pills that’ll keep your growth from getting stunted!”

After that, Tiara couldn’t speak either, overcome by her own humor. Her rollicking laughter caused the trampoline and thus the prodigious sneaker to wobble, while another tacky bead of her spit splattered beside her puny captures. The smell in the shoe was indeed certainly intense, enough that Liam took a full minute before he could refill his lungs, but once he did, he was reminded of the strangely-intriguing hint he’d been gifted before while Nele was equally ginormous as their friend and making him sample the inside. Though the malodor was appropriately zesty and bittersweetly-cutting, given the punishment this sneaker had recently endured pounding across a field with Nele’s overworked foot shoved inside, the little guy began to acclimate to the summery musk of his beautiful crush’s foot. He even appreciated it in the way of a potent whiskey that kicked him in the throat but nonetheless made him savor its richness, though of course he’d die of embarrassment before admitting that to anyone.

Nele, ironically, seemed to be having much more trouble adjusting. Her eyes watered and her wheezing became desperate, which gave Liam the opportunity to humbly help her stand up again, despite her having gently bullied him mere minutes before. While it was impossible to know how long their apparently very-powerful friend would drag out this elaborate and rather-stinky prank as a show of her supernatural prowess, the shrunken fellow looked on the bright side. At least he was closer to Nele, and no longer plagued by the feet of two giantesses at once, though Tiara’s drooling laughter and boot-boiled foot sweat, as well as her brawny wrinkled peds themselves, would be more than enough to deal with.

“Oh my God, Liam… I… I’m so embarrassed…” Nele whimpered as he put his arm around her. The girl sounded she might start crying, which Liam sympathized with given the acrid sting of the salty sole-leaked air around them, but then he realized she was simply humiliated. “First I went along with her and held my shoe over you while you were too small to fight back, but then I went down to your size and I saw for myself how scary it is… and now we’re stuck in here, and you have to put up with how DISGUSTING my gross shoe is! Ugh, it’s so awful! How can I ever make it up to you, Liam, and what are we going to do about HER?”

“It’ll be okay. And… it’s not that bad!” Liam said, meaning to comfort Nele, though it also wasn’t a total lie either. In fact, the longer he imbibed the balmy stench like ammonia inhalants and weird cheese, the more he came to be content with it. Feeling her shiver from degradation, nerves, and especially the squalid stink of her own feet, he held the girl closer for support. Once she’d calmed down slightly, Liam looked anxiously up toward the light, where the giant tomboy’s cheekily godlike grin was still displayed as she watched the millimeter pair endure the abominable belly of Nele’s grainy bare-worn sneaker.

“So I guess you two want to get out of there now, huh?” Tiara taunted.

“YES!” they wailed in unison.

“Well, why didn’t you just say so?” the giantess questioned, feigning innocence. Rather than reaching inside to collect them, however, she chanted another line from her scribbles, and suddenly the shrunken duo were flying up and out of the insole pit as though magnetized toward Tiara’s open hand. After winking at them on the plush terrain of her palm, she curled her fingers down overhead so their little world was darkened, while carrying them somewhere new. Though Liam hoped she was sincere now in ending a reality-breaking joke that had gone on far too long, he also knew his friend well, and as a result, was overwhelmed but not exactly surprised when the giantess reopened her fist to reveal that her two playthings were headed instead toward the black abyss that was the inside of her wretchedly-saturated boot.

“Oh, NO… she’s got to be kidding…” Nele croaked. Quaking yet harder as Liam held onto her, she looked high above to their captor’s determined face right as the titaness licked up another giggling drool-spot. “TIARA! DON’T - DO - IT!”

“No need to thank me!” their friend replied. “I know the sun must be getting to you two, what with you being so incredibly small, we don’t want you to just fry on the trampoline! So I’m going to give you plenty of shade to cool off!”

Tiara certainly did just that, lowering her palm the long distance into her deep boots like a mine shaft, where Liam and Nele found themselves overtaken by almost-complete darkness in the black rubber canal, but far more oppressive than the void was the sodden, piquant, putrefied essence that folded around them like a blanket the lower they dropped toward the worn-down basin. Yet again the giantess hadn’t lied about the state of these galoshes, except for the possibility of “cooling off.” Her own shoes truly were repugnantly riper than Nele’s in every way, hotter and more hopeless, the walls alive with dingy curdled sweat and thick in the nonexistent air as 100% humidity.

A few inches above the boot’s insole, which was a considerable drop for her barely-millimeter friends, Tiara tipped her hand and poured the speck-sized shrinkers out of her palm, causing them to tumble and yell before they made a squishy landing on the saltwater-disintegrated floor of their second much-worse prison. The volume of sweat oozing in every rubbery inch of terrain softened the impact enough that Liam and Nele weren’t harmed, though any soreness was made up for by reaching the zenith of vile stink and rotten toejam plaguing all surfaces around them. The opening to the boot was much further away, so high above that it felt more like the light at the end of the tunnel to the afterlife, but after the shrunken pair managed to get ahold of their nausea well enough to focus on the details of their loathsomely-smelly environment, they stared above and again were treated to a smug greeting from Tiara.

“Just sit tight, you guys! I want to try out more spells on you, since I’m obviously even better at this than I thought!” she announced, examining the page, then winked again. “Just kidding. As if you two could go anywhere without my help. Make yourselves at home in there, okay?”

Overcome by the indignity and repulsively ped-spiced flavor of this whole surreal situation, Liam and Nele huddled together, seated upon the squashy insole of the boot, though they definitely couldn’t ever hope to “make themselves at home.” The ground wet as a fully-soaked sponge and riddled with farmland grit, gummy sock fuzz, and flakes of rubbed-off foot skin calluses; most everything around them was black as a starless midnight, except for the occasional shining smears of congealed sweat on the curved walls; oxygen stopped flowing almost immediately, stagnant and acidic, which meant the only hope for continued consciousness was to take heavy sniffs from the oily air absolutely percolating with sole brine. Unlike in Nele’s sneaker, no matter how hard Liam tried, he couldn’t learn to enjoy the powerful smog of Tiara’s feet even slightly, and he guessed his fellow shrunken victim didn’t either, as again she was hunched over and retching from the taste. It was tough to imagine how this scenario could get more unpleasant.