Kaleb woke up on a hard, cold surface. His mind was foggy, and he took several minutes to process his new environment.
The sky above was white, the ground an endless plain of linoleum. Huge wooden cliffs loomed in the distance, casting a shadow over everything. The orange-tinted light seemed to suggest that it was late afternoon. It quickly became clear that Kaleb was a miniscule speck on a kitchen floor. Worst of all, he was buck naked.
Kaleb had no recollection of how he’d gotten to be this way. He could still remember basic stuff, like his name and birthdate, but even the name of the high school he went to was evading him. Even so, the kitchen that surrounded him seemed vaguely familiar. In lieu of his more pressing issue, he decided it best to deal with the memory loss later.
Kaleb shakily got to his feet, and took a few steps. He shivered, both in awe and with cold, gazing up at the impossibly large countertop that stood before him. For a time, Kaleb was entirely unable to process the sight. He pinched and slapped himself for good measure, but no dice. This wasn’t a dream.
He tried to guess his current height, but found nothing to compare himself to. Everything was just so big and far away. The linoleum tile he was standing on looked to be about twice his height along each side, though he didn’t know how big the tile itself actually was.
Looking around, Kaleb decided he should at least try to get off the floor, not wanting to go out under someone’s foot. After he was somewhere a little safer, he could try to come to terms with what was happening. Kaleb started the long trek to the counter, looking to climb up the side.
The new, magnified landscape was deeply unsettling. The floor looked like some endless, sterile plain. Crumbs of food littered the tiles, each one almost the size of his fist. As Kaleb walked, the warmth seeped from his bones, even though the kitchen wasn’t especially chilly. He sped up a little to warm himself and perhaps arrive at his destination a little sooner. Kaleb watched the counter grow closer, and began to wonder how he could ever hope to scale the thing.
When he was half-way to the base of the counter, the ground beneath him began to shake. Kaleb paused and tried to find the source of tremors. They grew stronger with each repetition, as if…
Kaleb saw an unimaginably large shape appear from behind the table, and looked up in awe. It was a person.
She came thundering toward him, talking on her phone. She was intent on something on the countertop and never looked down at him. Even at such a monumental size, she was pretty, a brunette with a light smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She wore a tank top and workout shorts, with grey ankle socks. Additionally, her skin seemed to glow, somewhat confusing Kaleb. He felt her footsteps in his chest now, as an uncomfortable, deep trembling. Kaleb was unable to move, frozen with fear.
Before Kaleb could leap out of the way, the woman’s socked foot crashed into him, throwing him forward and winding him. He landed under the countertop. For a second he was dazed, flat on his back and gasping for breath. He propped himself up on his elbows in time to see the foot rushing toward him again. Kaleb was unable to scream.
The toes slammed down just short of his trembling legs, and stopped. The girl appeared to be doing something on the countertop, and had never even noticed him. Kaleb collapsed with relief.
As he lay down and caught his breath, Kaleb began to detect a faint odor washing over him. Simultaneously, the leeching cold was banished by a radiating warmth. Kevin peered at the sock. He immediately noticed how filthy it looked. Dark, sweaty stains blossomed on the underside, and the silhouettes of her toes were painted with ingrained dirt. The smell quickly strengthened, becoming a sour reek that stung his nose. The humidity and heat radiating off the girl’s foot soon followed suit.
Despite his unfortunate position, Kaleb didn’t get up or try to move away. He reasoned that this was probably the safest place to be, even though the smell was starting to get to him. She wouldn’t step on him if he just stayed right here, he thought. Right here, under the counter. Once she’s gone, he could make his way up and maybe get her attention.
Waves of foot odor washed over him, and the humidity began to condense on his body, forming a thin film of muggy sweat. The heat, wetness, and cheesy stink was beginning to make him dizzy. Kaleb decided perhaps retreating deeper under the countertop would be a better plan. He was still fighting to catch his breath though, and could only manage a pitiful crawl.
Kaleb looked back at the monstrous foot. The toes wigged menacingly through the saturated fabric of the sock. The big one seemed to be about as long as his own body. From that, Kaleb guessed he was only two inches tall.
Almost imperceptibly, he started to shrink. By the time Kaleb noticed, he was only half his “original” height. He paused, dumbstruck, as the shrinking accelerated. He watched the world grow even mightier around him, watched as the girl’s foot swelled. The sight was so utterly alien, his mind was refusing to process it.
Kaleb struggled into an upright sitting position and gawked. The shrinking had mercifully slowed down, and his height seemed to be stabilizing. The girl’s smallest toe was now twice as tall as him.
The view at this size was even more disgusting. Feminine sweat gathered in pools around her toes, and the beginnings of a pale-yellow crust were visible near the tip of her socks. The smell was cloying, a vinegary, stinging miasma that seemed genuinely thicker than normal air. Desperation began to take hold.
Kaleb stumbled toward the open kitchen floor, giving the putrid feet a wide berth. Before long, he was out from under the countertop and breathing fresh, cool air. He chuckled with relief.
Then the ground shook, violently enough to bring Kaleb to his knees. He looked behind him and saw the titaness pivoting on her heel. He had severely overestimated how far away he’d managed to get, and this motion put the ball of her foot directly over him. Her socks from this angle were more terrifying than any sight Kaleb had ever witnessed, a great grey-yellow expanse, with the outline of her sole marked in dark grey dirt particles. The underside of the sock was full of holes along the ball and heel, many of them twice his size or bigger.
In the fleeting moments before the sole came down on him, Kaleb caught a glimpse of his torturer’s face. In those moments, a name appeared inexplicably in his mind, among a flood of vague memories and sensations.
Emilia.
Then she put her foot down.
Before Kaleb had any time to process his revelation, he found himself surrounded by Emilia’s socks. Luckily, her step had placed him in the gap between her toes and the ball of her foot. Unluckily, this part of the sock was drenched in sweat, and he was quickly covered in the thick, oily exudation. He had the sense to clamp his mouth shut, but the action forced him to take in the pungent reek of the titaness’s feet. When Emilia took another step, Kaleb was shocked to realize that the frayed fabric of the sock had looped around his arm, tying him to the behemoth ped.
Kaleb went up and watched the tiled floor blur past him, before being smashed back down into it. Miraculously, he remained unharmed, though he was dazed from being so violently shaken. The ratty sock fabric was so infused with old sweat that a flood of the stuff came gurgling out when the sock was pressed against the floor. For a moment, Kaleb was entirely submerged in it, close to drowning in nothing but this girl’s foot sweat. Then Emilia took another step. Relentlessly, the cycle repeated. It was on the fifth step that Kaleb noticed that he was growing smaller yet again. Caught off guard, he failed to keep his mouth closed during the next cycle. Emilia’s foot smashed him against the floor, squeezing out another torrent of sock-borne, stale perspiration, much of which ended up in his mouth.
Try as he might to spit it out, Kaleb swallowed at least a mouthful. The fluid was gummy and somewhat viscous, quickly adhering to face. The taste was beyond his comprehension; a cocktail of salty, bitter, and cheesy sensations assaulted his tongue.
As he suffered through this sampling of Emilia’s personal nectar, Kaleb shrunk yet again, dwindling down faster than ever. He watched the water-logged fibers of the sock become thick ropes, covered with a film of stale sweat. He was soon small enough to slip between the miniscule holes between the threads.
The interior of Emilia’s sock was an order of magnitude worse. The air may as well have been liquid. Great salty droplets stuck to his body, swallowing his limbs and threatening to drown him. Through the veritable ocean of sweat and the obscuring darkness of the sock, Kaleb caught glimpses of Emilia’s toes. They were monolithic, each one the size of a skyscraper and faintly glimmering in the dim light of the sock. The gap between her toes was distant enough to be obscured by what looked to be haze. Or maybe that was just the smell.
For what seemed like an eternity, Kaleb was tossed around in the hellish sock space, suffering the occasional shrinking spurt and swallowing more and more of Emilia’s filth. As time went by and her feet cooled off, the sweat began to solidify a little, approaching the consistency and stickiness of honey. Emilia eventually stopped moving, granting Kaleb a moment’s well-earned rest, lodged in the grungy sock fabric under her toes.
By now, even the soggy thread he was resting on was as wide as a city block. Kaleb watched the grimy toes above him as they fidgeted. Every movement was an enormous, subsonic tremor to him. When one of the toes brushed up next to him, the bits of dirt and lint that clung there were dislodged and landed around him with great thuds. The patch of skin between her toes was off in the hazy distance, but he could still see a trickle of sweat down there, as it reflected the dim light filtering in through the threadbare sock.
Kaleb had trouble seeing this expansive landscape as part of another person. The lowliest part. The space underneath Emilia’s toes may as well have been the entire world to him. It was there, breathing in the sour, stinging aroma from between the giantess’s toes, that Kaleb finally snapped.
As he sank into the gooey slime of Emilia’s sweat, he began sobbing. Kaleb felt so impossibly unimportant, so puny and powerless. Worst of all, he really was all those things. As the world crumbled around him, Kaleb felt the toxic stench finally reach a lethal intensity. His nostrils flared as he took deep breaths of it.
A few minutes later, he was unconscious.