Doubting Delilah (Chapter 2) (Patreon)

This was getting tough for Carrie to take now. She grumbled and took several deep breaths, trying to reconcile her grievance with her sympathy for Delilah’s naturally worldwide scope that unfortunately couldn’t fathom two-inch-tall humans at present. To get out some of her annoyance, she stomped her foot several times on the doughy terrain of her friend’s half-infinite palm flesh, which of course did nothing to make the ground yield. Not even a budge. It was highly unlikely that Delilah noticed her movement, let alone felt her leg striking the plain with all her Alpha-sized might. What must it feel like for an Omega, Carrie wondered? Being kicked by a mosquito, maybe?

The rosy ground of her enormous hand was adorned with oily print lines flowing like rivers, weaving into spirals on the hills at the hilt of each thick finger, and occasionally it made Carrie dizzy to stare out across the expanse of the Omega’s appendage for too long, watching the latticework of creases and ID-lines forming a mosaic of warm semi-damp skin which only even looked like human flesh when peered at from a good distance. It was almost too much sometimes. While slightly cupped, Delilah’s palm formed a lush valley like those at the base of a mountain, and indeed her colossal friend was exactly that at five miles high, taller than nearly any peak on the planet. It truly put into perspective the uphill battle Carrie faced here in convincing the Omega, but she wasn’t giving up yet.

“Okay, what about this,” Carrie said with fresh determination, and to her credit, Delilah listened intently. “What if you were a lot bigger than you are now? Four or five or TEN times as big. So big that you couldn’t even see me. Would that just mean I don’t exist, too?”

“Of course not! I already know you’re down there somewhere, even itty-bitty as you are. I can hear you, so you exist,” the Omega replied. “Heck, I can’t even see you most of the time anyway until I pick you up. Thank God we have cell phones. And if somebody hadn’t invented embarking platforms so Alphas can climb aboard Omegas, do you know how much of a pain it would be to try and grab you out of a crowd? Long story short, you’re real.”

“So what’s the difference, then?” Carrie wheedled. “Yes, you haven’t seen Betas before, and I’m guessing you probably wouldn’t be able to see them even if you had some of them standing in your hand too, but I’m telling you that they exist! They’re down there, all over the place! I’ve… I’ve talked to them, I’ve held them, even made friends with them!”

“Sure, sure,” Delilah said rather soothingly, on the verge of sweet-tempered patronizing. She nodded vigorously to appease her friend, but only succeeded in frustrating the Alpha more. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, Carrie. You know that I do. About MOST things, anyway. I just have a hard time taking things on faith, especially things as far-out as this, when I can’t see it for myself. And a lot of the time, even when I can see whatever-it-is for myself, it’s not at all what everyone says. It’s usually… a lot smaller. Almost nothing. I can’t tell you how many times my Alpha superior officers in the ranger force have sent me after a storm cell they’re calling an early apocalypse, and it was just a cute little tornado I slurped up in two seconds like cotton candy. Perspective, and what you can see with your own two eyes, is everything.”

Again this rationale tracked for someone of such dramatically super-human scale, but it infuriated Carrie all the same. Omegas were, literally, big-picture people, and it increasingly seemed that Delilah’s elevated view of the globe just might make her incapable of imagining things of impossibly small stature. Yet still, with the promise that her friend would stand up for Beta rights if only she knew there was such a creature that needed their rights fought for to begin with, Carrie silenced again to mentally regroup. She just had to think of a way to convince her.

As the conversation wore on, Delilah ambled forth. Her more than half-mile-long feet, encased in midnight-black combat boots, gradually peeled out of the wilderness and arced through the air, coming ever-closer now to the island-hubs of the domed Beta city ports sprinkled along the mountain-basin gorges. Citizens in the nearest bubble-shaped downtown proper watched as the unthinkably titanic Omega’s sky-silhouette was eclipsed by the zagging dusty treads of her boot’s underside, rising to the apex of its stride before descending, and consequently, enlarging steadily in their vantages. The people on the streets and in miniature high-rises alike had no time to be terrified, nor make peace with their religions or cry for help that wouldn’t come. It all happened in the blink of an eye, or rather one small step for Omegakind. Shadow ate up the last of the daylight. The rubbery channels etched into the treads that broke up the geometric isles, many of them alone almost as large as one of the metropolis’s hubs, swelled and blotted out all other views of the mountains beyond or even the distant other town-domes across the canyon, until the doomed citizens could only look up and see the filthy bottom of Delilah’s boot coming down.

The protective dome, capable of repelling avalanches and wildlife alike, popped as easily as a soap bubble when the giant boot crashed through. Next, the first lightning rods and skyscraper-summits at the highest elevations of the city district made contact with the hardy shoe’s underbelly, and there was no resistance, nor the slightest hiccup in the relentless pace of Delilah’s falling foot. The boot simply passed right through the buildings, homes, and streets easily as a dewy forest mushroom, and compared to the size of the five-mile world-ranger, it might as well have been; this section of town could have constituted land a dozen times larger, and still fit comfortably under the Omega’s boot for the crushing. The bullet train track leading into the next district collapsed, the stone path hanging thin as a white hair out from under where Delilah now stood as the only remaining sign that any civilization had ever been erected there.

All the intricate building designs of stone and steel, every cottage, streetlamp, bicycle, and of course miniscule human soul had now all been reduced to a gritty powder lodged in the broad grooves of Delilah’s boot treads. Meanwhile, the remaining metropolitan hubs placed intermittently among the mountain basin, in contrast to the first victimized district now buried under the Omega’s shoe, had plenty of time to hopelessly watch the whole nightmarish event from afar, process it, confirm that it did in fact happen, and then understandably fall into citywide panic. Hysteria took hold, and Delilah hadn’t even moved her foot again yet, though the chaos redoubled when the Omega finally did take another step, not only because they could see the grisly ashen remnants of the shattered district molded like clay into the shape of her tread-carved footprint, but because the continuation of her meandering gait meant all of them were now just as susceptible to the same squishy fate.