Time-Out: Whole World in Her Hands (Chapter 1) (Patreon)

There was a time when Scott would’ve witnessed all this in disbelief, convinced it was a sick night terror, but now he looked on his mother with resignation, as something inevitable as the heat-death of the universe. Indeed, this was an end of the world of sorts, or at least the world he recognized. Granted, it had already changed so much since Judy rose from her position as a power-hungry five-foot-eleven senator into a one-hundred-fifty-foot city warden, then again to a country-ruling five-hundred-foot citadel of a woman whose physical size was matched only by her boundless appetite. This final upcoming stage of her ascent was simply fated from that first growth, perhaps even before that. His mother could and would not be stopped by anyone on the globe, and certainly not by her son.

Washington DC, now the hub for Judy’s planet-owning dictatorship, was packed with visitors today who once represented the leaders of countries around the world, but who had now been reduced effectively to figurehead “advisors” for the golden-haired mega-matron who could run the day-to-day of their nations, but for all intents and purposes, were just keeping the lights on until Judy lumbered across the borders to make a statement and have a snack.

At the site of the former White House, which had since been demolished to make way for Judy’s open-air throne room, an international crowd flooded the streets for miles around. As usual, the queen herself took the center stage upon her gleaming seat, with size-changing machinery laid at her feet, along with a team of mute technicians preparing for the “swearing-in” of the new world leader, and finally the trio of her children nearby, though all anyone could see was the woman herself.

Judy was truly radiant, and knew it in her every atom, from that enchantingly smug smile to the drum of her rippling fingers on her thigh, one leg comfortably crossed over its opposite like a true warrior-monarch awaiting the spoils of her conquest. Every growth had further transformed her physique, vanishing all traces of motherly filling-out over the years, instead molding her to an uncanny goddess-silhouette befitting her station. She’d defied the telltale approach of middle age, too, losing laugh-line wrinkles and faint stretch marks, leaving her an ageless angel of death. Physically, she was just as compellingly magnetic as in her rhetoric.

Even Scott had to admit his mother was objectively worthy of admiration in this regard, her sun-soaked skin lustrous and porcelain-smooth, breasts bulging and upright, buttocks all but pouting. Those feet he’d spent so much time trapped beneath in his youth looked soft and inviting despite their athletic firmness, as though she only ever floated over the ground instead of trampling it under earth-quaking strides. Her more voluminous hourglass figure had winnowed and reformed until she could’ve only been imagined by some higher artistic power. All of this was owed to her step-by-step rise into a beautiful colossus, and to her altered diet plan, a fact she made a regular point of explaining to her offspring, Scott in particular, usually while indulging in a weeping handful of her favorite food.

Naturally, Judy did little to conceal her worship-worthy shape, with only the thinnest ceremonial garb even skimpier than the togas she’d previously worn: colorful and silken, but almost entirely translucent like woven fog, as she had nothing to hide, just as her subjects certainly had nothing to hide from her, nor anywhere to hide.

“Hear me, everyone. I’m sure my actions today and in the future will speak louder than my words, so I will be brief with you all, my most beloved people. My loyalists, my fuel, my sources of strength. Oh, this has been a long time coming,” Judy thundered to the crowds, dispensing with her usually-longer opening pleasantries. Even those people standing furthest from her among the thousands heard loud and clear. “I am grateful to see you all here, everyone who so rightfully chose peace instead of conflict by agreeing to this transaction of power, as today I unite the world under my guidance. You should be very proud of yourselves. I could not have done it without your faith in my leadership and your submission to a better Earth. There are no more presidents and kings, no more congresses or parliaments, and certainly no other gods. No religion but that which you have in me to see you forth and, if necessary, give yourselves for the betterment of superior life.”

Scott wrung his fingers until they almost popped from the sockets. He still wasn’t shocked at this almost-outright claim by Judy to be a deity. He was no longer capable of surprise from his mother’s insane proclamations that always went unchallenged, and instead let the words wash over him like river rapids, though that didn’t mean his oh-so-small average-sized body didn’t respond with the fright that came slowly and surely rather than in bursts. His fears were born from that occasion ten years before when he was first shrunken by Judy, and built steadily to now, at the culmination of all his parent’s mad hopes and dreams.

Without batting an eye, the woman had effectively declared herself goddess of the world. And they’d just let her. The former most powerful people on Earth were all assembled here, and while they were shaking on the inside just as much as Scott, they were equally silent. He looked to his brother and sister, who shared his despondency. Kyle couldn’t even bring himself to look up at Judy; Maggie had the courage to watch, but still looked afraid for perhaps the first time in her life. She reached out, grasping Scott’s hand, someone she’d once delighted in shrinking and tormenting, now understanding they had to stick together in the face of their overlord mother, who was about to make her current size look like a toddler’s stature.

“Without further ado…” Judy drawled. From upon her throne, the fifty-story woman raised a hand to her technicians, gradually curling her fingers into a fist. “It’s time you all had a ruler with the size to match her dominion. Let us begin.”

Then came the flash that wrapped around Judy and her royal seat, making her for a moment into an earthbound sun. The pulse was immediate, without a second’s hesitation from any individual who just couldn’t bear to grant Judy even greater strength, height, and domain; they had absolute faith, just like she wanted, in the fact that if they paused for but a minute, they’d all be made lunch and replaced. So the team bathed her in those crackling rays, and then the uber-queen on her throne made the supreme ascension in the span of ten damning seconds.

Though the structure of the prodigious chair itself carved up the ground and reached into the roads beyond during the enlargement, the first and most violent detail Scott consciously took in was the expansion of the seat’s owner, specifically her bare feet, as they were his mother’s closest point of contact with the world and her tiny children.

Those feet were certainly huge before, big enough to crush a whole house under her sole, an ability Judy had demonstrated on innumerable occasions whenever her next meals took too long emerging from their homes. They were almost seventy feet long then, yet that size was swiftly left in the dust, tripling in length as her creamy tanned peds swelled and bulked like the moving temples they were. The ground seemed almost to crack under the immense heft of those soles, sharing the burden with the regrown throne. Toes the size of cars curled and grasped the earth’s very crust, crunching it up in the doughy crevices between as powder. Judy’s naked feet now numbered no less than twenty-one stories long. Forget houses; she could’ve leveled apartment complexes under those beasts.

Stepping out of the shadow of his mother’s skyscraping furniture along with Maggie and Kyle, Scott stood in meek awe as the rest of his high-rise mother came into clarity against the backdrop of the cloudy blue above, which somehow seemed just that bit smaller now compared to the newly one-thousand-five-hundred-foot-tall woman: more like wallpaper instead of the sky. Up from her ginormous feet, Scott’s blurred vision traced along her flexed calves and thick-muscled thighs, all the way to the peak of those seventy-five-story limbs. Truly they were legs that could’ve just about held up a mountain.

The rest of her was equally grand in all the best and worst ways possible. Through the veil of her scant clothing, Scott studied the divoted sculpture that constituted Judy’s soft yet iron-caliber abdomen, a shape that would’ve been the envy of six-packed Olympians. Beyond that stomach wall, he knew, was now an even more vast pit of despair, surely already grumbling to receive sacrifices by the truckload, if not more. That bosom, from which he’d once drawn milk long ago, looked nothing like the weightier gravity-prone breasts of a forty-something mother, but instead supple and bold as miniature planets unto themselves, complete with a mountain peak erected at the center of each one and poking through the silk.

Judy’s face, however, said more about her surge in power than even her more than quarter-mile-tall body ever could. She was happy in her improved body, of course, but just as Scott now glumly viewed his mother’s ascent as inescapable, so too did the mighty woman herself accept this gargantuan development like business-as-usual. She wasn’t thankful, because she already knew she deserved it; this was merely kismet, the claiming of her birthright. A glowering smile was granted to her insectoid populace from that lovely countenance, framed by ear-to-ear dimples and a shimmering blonde crown.

“Like I said. There are no old systems. No politics or belief in any other. There is just me. I am, and I will continue to be,” Judy stated, as though reading scripture. Soles arching against the shuddering ground for balance, Judy stood, and oh how she stood. Her voice was so round and deep now from her upscaling, cloaking the whole city like a living loudspeaker, yet still retained its deceptive sugariness and femininity, which somehow made her more unsettling.

“Oh, God,” Scott mouthed involuntarily, before realizing he’d just uttered his mother’s legal title.

“Look on me, everyone, and know that you and everything you’ve built are in the right hands now,” Judy addressed her public, fists on her hips as she ponderously revolved on the balls of her feet. Even though she wasn’t taking a step, only grinding her boat-sized feet in a circle, Scott could feel the thrum of the ground under the pressure of his all-seeing mother. “Have faith, and you’ll be delivered, in whatever form that service may take. I look forward to hearing your prayers, your obedience to righteousness, and your acceptance of my growing empire. Return to your homes in all corners of the globe now, safe in the knowledge that even if your time spent in my world may be shorter than you once believed, it will be made all the more significant by your undying love for me. Now, if you’ll all excuse me… I have a celebration banquet to attend.”

The infinite crowd broke into murmurs, some of anxiety and some of religious fervor, though at this point the difference was meaningless. Despite buzz from so many bodies beyond, however, Scott could only pay attention, or indeed hear, one. He and his siblings stood dutifully still beside their mother’s two-hundred-foot-long sole-slab, hardy as marble until the plush skin cells twitched at the slightest motion of muscle beneath. Judy was stooping, her thin garments sweeping like the falling of the sky, as she reached for them, extending fingers the size of seven-story buildings to collect her kids.

“Come, my darlings. Mommy is famished.”

All it took was a gentle pinch. Smothered lovingly between the gridded fifteen-foot-wide pads of Judy’s fingertips, Scott and his siblings were made to feel the equivalent of a quarter-inch tall: far smaller than they ever could’ve become under the light of a shrink ray’s one-inch limit, in years before when Judy’s only way to be big was by miniaturizing her family. Closed into the expansive flesh-dome of Judy’s inner fist, Scott huddled close to his siblings and awaited the feast.

Minutes later, light bloomed back between Judy’s parted digits, allowing her children to stand on a cushy palm just shy of basketball court-length. At the edge of her hand, Scott, Kyle, and Maggie looked down from their thousand-foot-high perch at the level of her breasts, where Judy’s arm was raised stiff. Judy was standing right in the middle of the specialized stadium she had commissioned since her previous ascension, a venue made to house tens of thousands of people, though with no actual field at the center, for this wasn’t a place intended for games. Judy knelt down on the central grass patch, looking more like she was crouched in a spa instead of a titanic arena, though even crouched, she hovered above them all.