Best Laid Plans (Chapter 8) (Patreon)

With her piece said, Nicole dipped her foot to the side, descending her plump-ended pinky toe toward the Midtown epicenter. By concentrating, she could just barely detect the sensation of steepled high-rise buildings harmlessly spearing the pad of her digit as it fell, then contorting and cracking like dry reeds against the divoted spiral rings of her toeprint. Her pinky met the earth, and her fourth toe followed quickly after, creating a shockwave that briefly emptied the panicked wind-swept streets of ocean spray, only to contend instead with seismic ripples and the hulking brunt of those two immense brown toes themselves. By pressing down a third toe, Nicole was suddenly compressing half of Manhattan under her foot, with the two beefiest extremities yet to drop.

Savoring the steady decay of the architecture under her toe skin, which was happening simply by resting half her digits passively across the urban canyons, Nicole again looked to the miniature landscape cupped in her palm, then whispered so as not to accidentally blow the forestry, buildings, and especially the good doctor off into the stratosphere.

“I’m ready for another rise, little one,” she purred. “Make… me… bigger.”

***

Only by frenzied maneuvering did the news helicopter manage to dodge the plunging rainstorm of grit-clouded water droplets falling from the looming underside of the three-hundred-mile woman’s foot. Every plop was the size of a swimming pool, and could’ve knocked the chopper out of the sky with a single hit, but the pilot kept them in a constant spin, while the cameraman and reporter screamed and clung on for dear life. The sky had turned entirely to the textured dark-pinkish expanse of the stranger’s sole, and as it could’ve covered Manhattan several times over, the helicopter passengers couldn’t even see blue sky now, only ruddy callused arch flesh.

It was as though night had fallen under the African-American goddess’s ped, with the terrible shadows making it tougher to spot the oncoming droplets, but occasionally glimmers of sunlight shone between her writhing toes. Still, the hopeful view of the clouds above was made fearful all over again by the smiling countenance of the beautiful and anonymous destroyer of worlds looking down on them without pity.

The giant’s ear-splitting speech had shed at least some light on the insanity, yet still so little, as all the poor occupants of the chopper could know for certain was that this larger-than-life mythic behemoth wasn’t some ancient deity come to reclaim the Earth, but a former homeless woman, downtrodden and unknown, who had managed to grow to more than three hundred thousand times her former stature. And even if they could somehow communicate with a giant being who could probably only hear explosions like distant mosquito buzzes, they doubted she could be convinced to halt her destruction anyway.

Gradually the deadly downpour of ocean-bombs ceased, and the helicopter struggled to steady itself miles above the proceedings, battered but functioning. Below, they could see the suffering at play before the giantess had even physically touched her foot to the Big Apple. And once she started to move her foot to and fro, as if casting a curse on the city through the squirming of her bulbous digits, the buildings started to wobble, assaulted by wind and sea. The metropolitan marvel was utterly in the woman’s thrall, and she wasn’t even touching a single building or breakable human.

Yet.

Soon, her foot rolled onto its side, making it appear as though the skyscape itself was reorienting while the Earth reversed its axis, and then a plush and muscular brown pinky toe more concussive than an atomic mushroom impacted the heart of NYC.

The oily circumference of toepad skin rocked about, grinding down the buildings flattened beneath its mile-high heft, while surroundings skyscrapers billowed over. Naturally, the helicopter wasn’t immune to this descent, either, requiring an evasive sweep that actually tipped the vehicle upside-down while flying at top speed away from the dark mass of first one “baby” toe, and then a second even larger entity. In short order, half of the city was buried under the giantess’s pointed toe-tips, and all the chopper passengers could do was watch and weep in disbelief. In the face of so much senseless devastation by this spurned colossus, it seemed the situation couldn’t get any worse, though that was precisely what happened anyway mere minutes later, when her voice thundered from the heavens again.

Everything happened at once then. That trio of toes swelled until their burly underbellies covered the whole of Manhattan, without even having to use the two bulkier digits still gymnastically flexed overhead. The effect was so alarming and surreal, it almost appeared as though New York had shrunk to half its size, diminishing like a melting bar of soap under the hot, sweat-greased, dust cloud-delivering might of that astronomic foot.

But of course they knew Manhattan hadn’t diminished, which could only mean instead that the woman herself had nearly doubled in height again, above the five-hundred-mile mark and all but reaching for the stars now. Soon there was nothing left to see of the once-great city; the giantess’s foot mashed the rest of the way down to the ocean floor, twisting and pulverizing the final silvery remnants until it left behind only a crater on the coast which quickly filled in with saltwater in a deep series of bowl-depressions matching the shape of the woman’s toes. The landscape now closely resembled an old beaten-down flip-flop insole, with the foam stamped into the shape of its owner’s foot, except the effect spanned over twenty miles of ravaged underwater ecosystem, with Manhattan cleaned off the map forever.

“Oh, wow…” Nicole moaned with wonderment and thirst, her voice seeming to encompass the globe like a true deity’s. “If I knew all this was going to happen, I would’ve let them do all those experiments for FREE!”

Though the giantess hadn’t moved her seventy-mile-long feet for several minutes now, while still savoring the relaxing sensation of New York City’s brittle saltwater-washed wreckage scrubbing into the pithy underside pads of her toes the lower into the earth she pressed, her immensity had naturally become visible to every surrounding city with even a remotely clear view to the horizon: the largest landmark in human history. Nicole’s strolling rampage had cleared a great deal of mist and floating ash from the air, not to mention the cloud cover that once wreathed her black hair like an angel’s, which meant that millions of civilians now stood breathlessly in wait for her next move. Everyone was either glued to a TV or obsessively checking their phones for updates, while worldwide militaries pessimistically scrambled a new strike force. As it was now clear the girl would only continue to grow, an all-out final nuclear assault was decided upon, though even then, the officials in charge couldn’t help but guess their atom bombs would ping off Nicole like bug bites.