Best Laid Plans (Chapter 4) (Patreon)

“Dr. Ranson?” Nicole’s booming surprise spanned across the countryside like the voice of a bellowing god. “H-How’s that possible? How are you talking to me?”

“We planted a monitoring device in your head at the start of the tests, Nicole, which we reverse-engineered into a one-way telephone. Otherwise, you might have had trouble hearing us,” the doctor said with a chuckle, trying to lighten the mood, though the politicians and army-men he stood amongst didn’t smile, while they observed the eighty-mile insurgent from a military base rooftop.

“I don’t know what the hell’s happening. I j-just woke up this way, and… and…” Nicole sputtered.

Even from more than a hundred miles away, the doctor who’d invented the regeneration treatment could still feel her voice tremoring the very earth beneath the feet of the mere mortals who were nothing but invisible specks to her.

“I understand, Nicole. Don’t be afraid. It’s not your fault.”

“Please, you have to make me small again!” she begged, raining a fresh natural disaster of tears onto another city as she turned in the other direction. “I’ll d-do whatever it takes!”

“Of course. We’ve been working on a way to reverse this. You’ve not only been taking a round of pills, but also nano-particles that help monitor your health. These should be able to soak up the chemical effects,” Dr. Ranson explained. “Just hold still, and we should have it working soon.”

“Okay,” Nicole breathed, mustering a smile out of sheer crazed relief. “T-Thank you.”

“Don’t worry. You’ve been such a helpful patient, and we wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to you.” At this point, the doctor switched off the communication device and continued tinkering with the machinery they’d managed to salvage after Nicole’s growing body ripped the laboratory apart like tissue paper.

“I still think we should ring up every country on the globe with a nuclear arsenal and say point ‘em this way, right at her,” an army general gruffly snorted, as the gathered response team watched Ranson work. “Quicker and cleaner.”

“Nonsense. This will work much better.”

“But it’ll kill the bitch, right?” the general interrupted.

“There’s no need to be cruel, but yes, it will kill her,” the doctor sighed, clearly depressed. “It’s a shame. She was turning out to be such a promising test subject. Her body really took to the treatments. Granted, it’s an awful price to pay, that all those people had to lose their lives, too, but sometimes progress demands sacrifice. Plus, I… have to admit, I always found her a little attractive, in a rough-and-tumble sort of way.”

“Just hurry up and do it,” the general snapped. “You said she was homeless, right? Don’t get so weepy. Not like anybody would miss her.”

“Yes, I suppose you’re right,” Dr. Ranson said. “My equipment is online. Any moment, she should begin to reduce, and by the time she’s back to normal, there will be nothing left of her to harm anyone else.”

***

Nicole stiffened to attention when she felt the electric tingle of the counter-measures taking hold of her innards. She realized it was a familiar sensation, but one she hadn’t realized was caused by nano-technology, let alone what it meant to have tiny machines in her body. All she knew was that she was glad to have Dr. Ranson come to her rescue and shrink her back down so she could begin a lifetime of apologies for all the strife caused by her feet. She peered down at them between her legs: her innocuous, mocha-hued, creamy-smooth, rather-cute bare peds which might’ve even appeared glamorous in another life, if they hadn’t been so weathered and marinated in street-dreck over the years, like diamonds in the rough.

Wiping the last of her tears, Nicole braced herself for whatever was to come, careful not to let her feet budge too much for the oncoming shrinkage, as she wasn’t sure how much this might hurt, and was anxious of accidentally kicking up more carnage beneath her beefy soles in the process of trying to prevent more giga-scale bloodshed.

When the first jolt overtook her, Nicole shut her eyes, expecting to open them again and find herself perhaps reduced to a “lowly” forty miles tall instead. Instead, she felt a curious cool breeze, and the rippling of landscape against her scrunched toes, the rocky ground itself bending easily as grass to her skin.

The next sensation Nicole noticed was the mountainous terrain she was using as a bench seemingly sinking beneath her bottom like piled beach sand. Alarmed, the giantess anxiously opened one eye and turned around to check if she’d caused an avalanche with her weight, but found the hilly peaks weren’t actually crumbling beneath her, at least not yet; she was simply rising higher, until the tiny summits felt more akin to fragile gopher mounds.

Swinging back around to face the civilized landscape again, and looking to her dusty naked feet, Nicole’s panic only increased at the sight of the greenery and bedrock ripping up and folding over itself like sheet-cake frosting while her calmly resting peds inadvertently bulldozed through miles of terrain at a time just by standing still. Immediately she lifted both soles out of the deep footprint-shaped twin canyons she’d newly minted, keeping her feet hovering in midair above the smoldering wreckage. Even from an angle, she could tell unmistakably that the ovular crater she’d just accidentally stamped into the ground made her previous giant prints look like those of children.

Something had gone deeply, calamitously wrong. She wasn’t shrinking, but growing even more colossal than before. In fact, by the time her head stopped passing through denser clouds even while seated, she guessed she’d nearly doubled in size. Even while squinting, the once-distinct patches of shiny metallic urban sprawl like patches of silver crabgrass had become blurry blobs hardly separated from the surrounding land. But such was the difficulty of trying to divine things on the scale of mere humans, when the once-humble homeless woman had ascended to no less than one hundred and fifty miles tall.

Try as Nicole might to stay balanced on the mountain range with her legs held aloft, she soon grew tall enough that it became impossible to stay rooted here without setting down a foot for support, or otherwise risk her entire body tumbling down atop the vulnerable cities beyond which had already suffered so greatly from her unaware mud-smearing pedicure. Straining under the weight of such an astronomic goddess, the mountains soon began splitting apart into pebbles just as easily as the skyscrapers she’d trodden upon earlier.

Scared of wiping out into the populous countryside again, Nicole chose the lesser of two evils and swiftly brought both feet down heels-first to stop herself from going sideways, though in her nervousness to avoid further carnage squashed beneath the meaty rivets of her sole-wrinkles, it occurred to her that she’d taken a stand a little too quickly.