Best Laid Plans (Chapter 6) (Patreon)

When Nicole finished her outburst, she paused to catch her breath, disbelieving some of what she’d said, as though imbued with a higher power, but now that her words had thundered across the countryside with the same force as her footsteps, she realized it was true. All this time, she’d been looking for guidance and protection from the very same company that saw her as nothing but a lab rat. She’d gone to them when she had no other choice for shelter, and they’d answered her desperation with sickness and brain-screwing. They had used her body however they wanted, just because they could. Because they had more resources and power, and because they were “bigger” than the lowly street urchin.

But no more. Nicole smiled wider than she had in years. Though the mad scientists in that laboratory had provided her with food, water, and a roof over her head, it turned out the most important asset they’d gifted her was knowledge of her worth. Why were any of the insectoid people mewling helplessly at her colossal peds any more deserving of compassion? Math wasn’t Nicole’s favorite subject, but even she couldn’t ignore the overwhelming divide between a being whose strides could split the planet’s tectonic plates like pastry crust, and beings who would be blown away like aphids in the slightest breeze of her monolithic mocha-brown soles. The two just couldn’t be compared as equals.

She deserved to stand above them all, and take whatever she needed to sustenance and amusement, simply because she was the biggest, strongest, and most impressive creature on Earth, if not further into the cosmos. Looking down again, the hundred-fifty-mile new goddess splayed her rubbery toe-tips apart, marveling at the even-finer texture of the miniscule world below. She squinted to observe the array of sparkly grey debris in the narrow space between her two thickest digits, stooping for a better view.

Though that U-shaped spot astride her brawny big and second toes looked like little more than gravel poured out of a blender, she understood now that the gemstone-like sheen meant this was the crumpled site of a once-dense urban sprawl, rich with technological advancements, soaring high-rises, and thousands of lives. All of that supposed value could fit snugly in the area between Nicole’s toes like a foam separator pad used for pedicures. A city like this would’ve once served as a harsh concrete habitat for a girl like her, populated by people who’d sneer rather than help a fellow human being. And now it was reduced to dust.

Pinching the oily bulbs of both digits together, then, and squeezing the crispy remnants of the city tight against her dirty flesh so it dispersed as ashes, the giantess pondered how she ever could’ve seen such a place as anything less than grit caught in the ringed grooves of her toeprints.

While remaining hunched over, enjoying the relaxing properties of skyscraper-powder treating her sore toes and ruddy soles, Nicole was surprised, but this time not frightened, by another strange flicker of firefly light, though of course dimmer now due to her near-doubling in scale since the last nuclear assault. The glowing speck, now no brighter than a stray ember from a cigarette, landed squarely atop her burly foot.

A second missile followed immediately, striking her cheek instead just below her eyelashes. Wincing, Nicole flicked the mushrooming cloud of atomic energy clean off her face, then did the same to the miniature explosion unfurling on the slope of her foot, pushing it between her toes right onto the rubble of the metropolis, thus incinerating what small pieces hadn’t already been obliterated at a molecular level by the crushing might of her beefy mile-tall toes. She felt the stinging heat of both bombs, of course, but decided not to let the microscopic fools below realize this.

“Excuse me, you guys… but it’s almost like you didn’t hear a word I just said!” Nicole boomed. Despite her annoyance at the insolence of these subordinate life forms, she cracked another grin that struck terror into the hearts of everyone still alive and in eyeshot of the beautiful, earthen harbinger of doom. When she spoke again, it was with almost-religious grace she didn’t realize she had: “Don’t you see it, too? I am MORE than all of you. You treated me like dirt, as an object to play with, because you didn’t see me as a person. Well, turns out you were right about that last part. People like you are nothing next to me. Under me. You don’t stand a chance, and that’s okay, because I’ve spent my entire life being stepped over. Now’s the time I step on you instead. And all will be right with the world. MY world.”

Nicole took two thudding steps away from the trampled battlegrounds of her homeland, and found herself standing at an ocean coastline which looked more like a drained kiddie pool, the waves no deeper than a rainwater puddle. Crouching again to better observe herself in the mirror of the ocean, Nicole got a clearer visage of herself than she’d had for quite a while, since there were no mirrors in the laboratory. Her reflection was distorted slightly while the seas churned due to her approaching footfalls, but she could see enough: though she still saw herself bathed in dust, her raven-dark tresses tangled, Nicole also saw something new.

Not the homeless woman, or the lab experiment, or the invisible victim.

A Goddess.

***

Dr. Ranson wasn’t even sure he was still alive after the shell-shocking chain of destructive events had collapsed most of the military installation and scattered the forces about the ash-clouded fields. First came Nicole’s accidental second growth, then her ear-aching roar of superiority, next the nuclear armaments lighting up the sky, and finally the even-more catastrophic force of the giantess’s shuffling soles making atomic eruptions seem like fizzling firecrackers. If he didn’t know any better, he’d have guessed the astronomic lady’s stamping had thrown the planet off its axis.

After the rippling earthquake activity of Nicole’s distant multi-trillion-ton bare feet had leveled the military base, Dr. Ranson climbed out of the debris, and was surprised to find his machine still mostly-intact after the overzealous gunmen shut it off. He was certain before he’d done everything correctly to shrink the girl, which might well have meant there was no way to reverse the process. Piecing back together the mechanism, the doctor discovered his invention miraculously still worked, and what’s more, maintained its connection to the nanotech in Nicole’s body. Sure enough, he wasn’t wrong before; her body had just become like a self-sustaining power source, its own burning sun, and stimulating those forces would only cause her mighty frame to continue ascending. There was no way to shrink her.

At this revelation, Dr. Ranson slumped against the machine, haunted by a million questions of his part in this error. In the hysteria of this scientific disaster, he found his mind drifting instead to the self-confident philosophy the tallest girl on Earth had pronounced. As a man who’d dedicated his life to fulfilling the potential of human biology, he was startled to find that the giantess’s emotions were his guiding principle now, but then again, all else around him had been reduced to smoking ruin, the army could only irritate her, and the science itself had gone haywire. Meanwhile, Nicole was the only recognizable shape still silhouetted against the sky, a hundred-fifty-mile beacon of truth whose power was so unquestionable that Dr. Ranson knew it would’ve been arrogant of him to dismiss her as only an accident. At a certain point, random chance couldn’t explain the lovely and deadly deity who towered above them now. Maybe, just maybe, she did deserve to stand above them, if not even higher. As a man of science, he had to obey the will of evolution and survival-of-the-fittest.

“Nicole?” the man whispered into his headset. Hearing a crackle, he wondered if the communication devices were still linked after all the ravaging of Nicole’s padding soles, but sure enough, the voice came back:

“Yes, little one?” Her voice reverberated across the land until it shook Dr. Ranson’s bones.

“Are you… all right?”

“Yes. Actually, I’ve never felt better. And I guess I have you to thank for that, don’t I?”

“I’m not sure,” he answered honestly, not knowing whether her growth was really due to biotechnology or divine kismet. “What do you want, Nicole? You’re right that all this time we’ve used you for our own benefits, and I’m sorry for that, but now I think you deserve to have a say.”

“Why do you care what I want? Are you just trying to stop me from squishing all of you? Because it won’t work. You’re less than a bug to me now, doctor. Just a part of the ground I walk on.”

“I’m not trying to stop you,” the man stated with difficulty. Hearing silence as Nicole took in his words, he repeated: “Please. What do YOU want?”

“To be even more than this. Bigger, taller, stronger, better.”

“I… can give that to you,” Dr. Ranson uttered into the speaker.

It felt for a moment like he was betraying humanity, yet at the same time, upon regarding the giantess again standing taller than the planet’s atmosphere, with her mile-high feet piled atop the carpet of ruin she’d wrought simply by pacing in circles over the crunchy cities that had treated her so poorly through the years, his decision seemed correct.

“Why would you help me?” Nicole demanded. “Do you understand? I’m going to step on it. ALL of it. Especially New York, and D.C. You don’t know how long I spent on the streets in both those places, begging for help, just trying to get a job, and everybody kicked me down. Every time. So it’s my turn now to kick them down.”

“I understand,” the scientist gulped, then added: “I only have one request, and then I’ll make you as big as you want.”

“What is it, then, you insignificant little nothing?” she scoffed. The insult thundered over the country, yet Dr. Ranson couldn’t even argue it. Since he now belonged to a micro species which could fit anonymously into asteroid-sized balls of toejam upon the filthy callused edifice of those smooth brown feet, Nicole wasn’t wrong to view him this way, considering it would now be literally impossible for her to see him without a microscope the size of a space station. He was nothing. But at least now, he had a chance to witness the titaness’s righteous cause.

“Let me watch you do it,” he pleaded.

Ten minutes later, after much careful guidance from the scientist, Nicole had scooped the rigid pillars of her fingers several miles beneath the fallen city surrounding him and picked up an entire county in her palm, all for the literal upholding of the bargain. Though several times during the ascent toward the clouds as she picked “him” up, Dr. Ranson was thrown about the devastated military base, but managed to secure himself and the size-altering technology behind a vault door just before the upward roller coaster of Nicole’s flying isle of a hand reached too soaring an altitude to breathe.

“I’ve got you now,” she whispered to the muddied crumble of forestry and civilization balled in her hand. “Wherever you are in there.”

“Y-Yes, I see that,” the doctor gulped, peeking up from this hundred-mile perch and finding that now, having been cupped to chest-height on the nomadic goddess, the landscape of her face was all he could see, blotting out the whole sky behind the black veil of her tangled hair. Though her features were still weathered by dust and street life, her beauty was made even more immaculate, like some mythological manifestation of Mother Nature, utterly dwarfing even the highest mountains of her creation.

“Well?” she droned. “It’s your turn. Do it, or I’ll drop you.”

“Of course,” he sighed, switching on the machine. “Let’s see how high we can take you.”