Best Laid Plans (Chapter 5) (Patreon)

“My God…” Dr. Ranson gasped, realizing his mistake entirely too late.

He wrestled with the machine, pulling switches while the military forces around him watched the skies in furious awe, for Nicole had become their sky now. In a flash, her shapely curves were expanding, her limbs stretching in immaculate proportion, and her feet swelling up from the shuddering ground. While the girl had appeared to sit off in the far distance at first, by the end of her second growth, it seemed there was almost no space at all separating her from the task force working to diminish her. This wouldn’t have seemed such a crazy prospect, though, if the puny crowd of helpless officials was able to comprehend that the poor living experiment’s world-weary bare feet now numbered twenty-two miles long apiece.

While Nicole stared in gape-mouthed shock at the mountains turning to rock salt under her one-hundred-and-forty-trillion tons of svelte body weight, a row of ten plump-tipped toes the height of the Empire State Building ten times over formed a new horizon for the scientists and soldiers, blocking out much of the ravaged landscape beyond which was currently being compacted to grit under those pale-hazel soles, the arch skin weathered-smooth and toughened by shoeless years on the streets. Over the rounded intricately-ringed pads of the giantess’s callused brown toes, the horrified men could barely see the sun anymore, though of course the face of the godlike girl herself was visible too.

“Shut it off!” the general roared at the doctor.

“I’m… trying,” Ranson meekly cried. He scurried about, trying and failing to reverse what he’d done, but to no avail. “I… d-don’t know what’s wrong with-”

The general, nodding to his subordinates, stepped aside while a troop of soldiers began ripping out cords and smacking the machinery with their rifles, until it powered off. Thrown to the side, the inventor tried to stop them, but was held down.

“NO!” Ranson shouted. “Y-You can’t! We need to undo this!”

“You had the chance for that,” the general said. Conspiratorial murmurs passed between politicians and commanders.

“W-What are you going to do?”

“What we’ve always done. Stop an enemy invader in their tracks, by any means necessary.”

“You don’t have a chance! S-She’s even more unstoppable now than before! But I don’t think she means any harm. She didn’t realize what she was doing.”

“That’s why you’re going to help us. Convince her to stay right where she is. Then we’ll put together a real welcome wagon for her. But until then, don’t let that bitch budge a single toe.”

As if on cue, the full realization of her evolution hit Nicole, and she lifted her feet off the ground, which earned a gasp from all the gathered forces, but not so great as the collective scream when she had no choice but to balance herself by planting her feet back to earth harder than necessary. Though her peds were no longer close enough for onlookers to see the fleshy crags which formed the individual skin cells of her dark doughy toes using the naked eye, it wouldn’t have mattered if Nicole stomped from ten miles away or one hundred. Her body was tall enough that she could’ve lain down and stretched from head-to-toe halfway across California. Practically everyone in the hemisphere felt the tremor when she slammed her heels into the ground right then, burrowing pits five miles deep on the spot beneath the weightiest portions of her feet, and sending out a seismic shiver plus a series of devastating aftershocks across the countryside originating from where the pads of her wrinkly soles pancaked to the ruined terrain.

“Nicole?” Ranson blurted into his headset once he managed to stand again. He tried to stay calm for her sake, or rather everyone else’s, considering how easily the giantess he’d drugged up was able to create natural disasters totally on accident, and he couldn’t risk startling her, or else she might have a seizure that wiped out the whole seaboard. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes, I can hear you!” Nicole boomed. Naturally her voice was even louder now, adding to the vibrations upsetting the foundations beneath them. “What happened? I thought I was gonna get smaller, not even BIGGER!”

“I know, I know. I apologize if it… frightened you. We had a mix-up down here.”

“A mix-up? What kind of mix-up?”

“We’ll be working on a solution. For now, just… sit tight, please?”

“How am I supposed to do THAT when I’m the biggest goddamned thing that’s ever lived?” Nicole wailed, quickly succumbing to hysterics. Rolling her momentum up from her heels to the balls of her feet, the slender giantess lurched to a stand, creating a dust-storm when the tempest wind of the 150-mile woman’s ascension rained filth and smoke off her body, and especially from the yawning canyons between her toes.

“N-No, Nicole, please listen to me. Do not stand up. Just… sit back down, exactly where you were, and-”

“I feel like I’m losing my mind, I’m serious! I’m so big I could probably take a bath in the ocean. Actually… it wouldn’t even be deep enough for me now! I mean, I can’t even see you now! Well, I couldn’t really before, but at least I could still see the cities. Now there’s NOTHING. I’d say you might as well all be ants, but ants would be like Godzilla to you folks now. You’re just… nothing. It’s only me up here now, doctor, plus the little voice in my ear of someone who filled me up with crazy science bullshit, and told me what to do while keeping me in a cage, and I… I…”

Ranson could hear the insanity rising like a sickness in Nicole’s voice, driving her toward a breakdown, which would almost certainly mean a foot-stomping tantrum that could split the Earth down to its core. Frantic, he tried to come up with the right words to save humanity and keep the giantess calm until the army could devise a weapon capable of cutting her down. Before he could speak, though, Ranson was flummoxed to hear Nicole’s voice ringing out again, cloaking the nation in its silky omniscient power, like the voice of an angel:

“…and I don’t have to stay in the cage you built me,” she whispered like an enlightened lullaby. Her fingers balled into fists; her toes thoughtfully scrunched against the ground, demolishing hills too short to even touch the spirals on the underside pads of her digits. “I can’t see you anymore, not because you’re too small, but because you don’t have to matter to me. You never did. I’m just tall enough to see it for myself now.”