Waking up for the second time that morning, Laffey rolled onto her back and stretched, giving a cute little yawn when she finished and putting a hand over her mouth. The commander was then treated to another close-up view of Laffey's gaping maw, with its glistening white teeth taller than mountains, a tongue that seemed a whole landscape in itself, and a throat big enough to swallow cities whole. Her soft breath blew across the hilly land of her palm, rocking his little car and threatening to send it flying.
“Hm? Why does my palm feel sticky?” Laffey thought, and after yawning she looked it over, trying to remember what had happened to it. She had a sense there was something important she was forgetting, but as her eyes passed over the Commander, failing to see him or his little car, she shrugged it away. “It'll come back to me eventually,” she thought, and sat upright with another yawn.
Stretching out her legs, her feet once more came to rest near the unfortunate shrunken city on the floor, and the hundreds of thousands of microscopic humans there looked in fear and trembling at her looming soles, whose every twitch sent tremors to rock their tiny little world. But Laffey knew nothing of their plight, and she calmly picked up her phone and turned it on so she could start the morning with some cute animal videos.
She thought it strange that it had been turned off, but she dismissed it from her mind until she got a call from the Commander; then everything came back to her. “Huh. I guess it wasn't a dream,” she muttered as she opened her hand again and looked at it with fresh eyes. “Good morning, Commander,” she answered the call. Despite knowing all about his situation, and that of the tiny city on the floor, she sounded no more concerned than she had moments ago.
“Laffey, please tell me you're finally done sleeping.”
“I guess I am. Why do you ask? Oh, wait, you wanted me to help you and the city, right? Where is the city, anyway?” She looked around, following the Commander's directions, until she noticed the small grey spot, no bigger than an inch, on the floor at her feet. Laffey scooted closer to it, bending her knees to keep her feet flanking the little thing, laying her soles flat on the floor. “Is that it?” she asked, turning her hand up-side down so he could see it.
The commander stayed on her palm thanks to the microscopic forces that bound him to the shipgirl's skin, his stomach lurching as he watched the whole world turn upside-down. “Y-yes, that's it,” he said, fiercely gripping both the phone and steering wheel to deal with his nausea. “Please move your feet away from it. We don't want anything to happen to it.”
But Laffey had put down her phone to focus on that patch of grey before her—that little spot of dust where, according to the Commander, almost a million tiny souls were standing. “What a tiny thing,” she mused, noting how easily her toes dwarfed it in size, and especially in height. The city seemed almost flat from her perspective, its tallest buildings not even reaching the height of a single grain of sand. “I wonder, if there are really humans down there, can they really be considered people at that size?”
Laffey meant no harm by it, but at her immense scale, her words held a threatening tone to the tiny people beneath her, especially when she turned her feet on their sides and tented them over the city. Her soles now cast their shadows on the tiny city, threatening them with annihilation. Even her tired red eyes, half-lidded with the shipgirl's usual lethargy, seemed to radiate an ill-intentioned glow as they peered down on everyone.
The city awaited its destruction with bated breath, but the disaster that struck next wasn't the one they were all expecting. As she contemplated the tiny city, Laffey softly wiggled her toes and slid her big toes against each other, sending down a shower of dust particles and dead skin cells, microscopic to Laffey but gigantic to the people below. The dust floated gently downwards, yet to the shrunken humans it seemed to fall with meteoric speeds to crash violently onto the ground. The smaller specks, about the size of cars, landed with little damage, but there were others that wreaked havoc on the little city, flakes of dead skin as big as their tallest buildings. Laffey could never have imagined what destruction that little toe-wiggle was causing down below, and even the Commander could only guess at what effect the presence of her colossal feet was having on everyone else.
“So what should I do with it, Commander?” she asked into her phone.
“The first thing to do,” he began, “is to make sure the city stays safe. It would be ideal if we could move it off the floor, but we'll probably have to settle with putting a glass cup over it or something.”
“Okay, got it. I'll try to pick it up,” Laffey said, and put down her phone before she could hear the Commander shouting at her not to do so.
The shipgirl lay flat on the ground, resting her head right next to the city so she could look closely at it, then carefully slid her hand nearer, stopping once the city sat between her thumb and forefinger. She curled her fingers so that the ends of her fingernails lay flat on the ground, and with a look of great concentration she started sliding them together.
Down below, thousands were screaming at the approach of her monstrously enormous fingers. Even her nails alone were thicker than any of their buildings, and as those huge walls of hardened keratin reached the outermost city blocks, everything they touched was instantly bulldozed and pushed along as a growing pile of debris. People, cars, houses, even the street itself—to Laffey, they were nothing but the finest dust, effortlessly swept up by her nails. Yet, even when those nails came together, all they did was crush everything caught between them, leaving a terrible scar that cut the little city in half.
Laffey huffed in annoyance at her failure, the puff of wind from her lips blowing away much of the destruction her fingers had wrought, and tried to think of some other way to pick them up. She licked her fingertip and held it over the city. Her spit would definitely hold at least a good chunk of the city, but to the micro humans' great relief she moved her finger away without doing anything—even she could tell that she'd just crush everything if she tried that. Maybe she could make them climb on a piece of paper and then lift them up.
No, not a piece of paper. Something like that could get blown away, and then what would become of the tiny people? She had a someplace better for them in mind. Sitting up again, she brought a single foot up close to the city, resting her heel on the floor but hovering her toes over that little grey patch. Then, splaying her toes wide apart, she carefully lowered her foot until her big and second toes landed gently to either side of it.
Nothing had been crushed, this time, but it was a close call. In many places, the outskirts of the city stood under the curvature of her toes, and the people there found that Laffey's light pink skin now took up most of the sky. A mere twitch of her toes would suffice to wipe out half the city or more, but Laffey kept them still. Even so, a rhythmic tremor could be felt all over the city, one caused by the pulse of blood rushing through her sole.
Like mortals at the foot of a divinity, they awaited their judgement in silence, anxious to know if they were to die today. Laffey said nothing either, just looked at them with the same sleepy stare she'd been wearing all along. Finally her words boomed down on them. “Are you humans climbing yet?” she asked with a little wiggle of her toes that flattened dozens of city blocks
The people screamed and shouted while her toes thundered around them, but when they settled down again and everyone could think back to her words, they began to wonder if they'd heard her correctly. “Climb”? Climb what?
The people looked at her toes, towering monstrosities that stood ten miles tall, dwarfing even Everest with their might. Did she really expect them to climb those things? And how? The people were so tiny that they could walk for hundreds of feet under the curvature of her toes without actually coming within reach of her skin, and even when they did reach it, it would be more like a ceiling than a wall to them. Even an expert mountain climber couldn't hope to climb something like that in any timely manner; what hope did the rest of them have?
Still, some desperate few did go out to try it, thinking it better to take a chance on her foot than to stay down here to be crushed like the thousands that her nails had felled. They walked deeper and deeper under her toes, or towards her sole. The atmosphere of her foot became stronger and stronger with every step they took. Even back in the city everyone could feel the heat radiating off her skin and catch the scent of her foot in their every breath—thankfully softer than last night when she'd first slipped off her boots—but here under her toes the intensity of it all was doubled, and doubled again when her skin finally came within reach.
One after the other, the humans reached up to grab ahold of Laffey's skin and pulled themselves up with surprisingly little difficulty. Then, as the rest of their bodies came in contact with her skin, they repeated the Commander's discovery that the microscopic forces of her body pulled them to her in defiance of gravity. It was as if Laffey, and not the Earth, was now their world.
After getting on her skin, they walked further up, wondering at how this young shipgirl's foot seemed transformed into a whole new landscape to them. Soon they could be seen even by those who had stayed in the city, and who were no less amazed than them by it.
As awareness spread, more and more people went to join them in leaving their city for Laffey's toe. This great migration took place right in the shipgirl's sight, her eyes shining down like moons on the city, yet Laffey could see none of it. Even looking directly at the huge masses of people moving through the streets, she was left to wonder if the humans were climbing her or not. Already twenty minutes had passed, and she was starting to get hungry; she decided to give them ten more before she went to get breakfast and calmly waited for them all, resisting the urge to tap her toes.
“I'm getting up in one minute. Hope you're almost finished,” she said, and started counting down from sixty.
Her announcement spurred the people closest to her to start running, but those who were further back turned around and ran from her toes. When she reached “zero”, everyone on her foot threw themselves on the ground. Their stomachs lurched and their hearts almost jumped out of their chests as Laffey lifted her foot. Even though they were all kept safely in place, still the sense of speed was intense.
It was amazing, too, to see the world beyond Laffey's foot go sideways and then flip over as the shipgirl grabbed her foot and turned it around, peering at the space between her toes. To her it looked no different than before, yet it held more than one hundred thousand souls. Man or woman, young or old, every one of them gazed in awe at their host's titanic red eye—a new sun to them all.
Laffey put down her foot and turned her attention to the city now. She figured half an hour should have been enough for everyone to leave it, so surely she could clean it up now, right? She didn't want to leave it dirtying her floor, after all.
Again she licked her fingertip and held it over the city, and the half-million people still standing down there screamed in terror. One quick swipe was enough to clean it up in its entirety, leaving only some errant bits of rubble floating in pools of her saliva, while everything else was glued to her fingertip by her spit. Some did survive—after shrinking, they were all more durable than they looked—but it was less than one percent, and all of them were buried deep under the remains of their city, caught under the rubble and often drowning in Laffey's spit. Yet Laffey was sure there was nothing on her fingertip save the grey dust of the shrunken city, and in her curiosity she brought it to her mouth for a taste.
As her fingertip sank into the plush field of her tongue, the city's remnants were washed away by the ocean of spit. The tiny humans were freed from the rubble as everything dispersed into her saliva, but they were still helplessly drowning in her mouth, trying desperately to swim for a the surface. But soon her finger retreated and her lips closed behind it, and the humans were left in utter darkness.
Laffey's tongue then stirred, carrying the city's remnants upwards to be savored, churning the ocean of spit in which the tiny humans floated. Those who weren't crushed by the limber landmass were spread out to every corner of the shipgirl's mouth, hanging from the roof or oozing down her inner cheeks, smothered between taste buds or underneath her tongue.
But despite the half-million bodies, living and dead, now in her mouth, despite the countless tons of concrete, asphalt, and more, Laffey found to her disappointment that she couldn't taste anything at all from the city. Even a single grain of salt would have had more taste. She swallowed, sending some survivors down to meet their end in her stomach, but many more still hung out in her mouth, slowly drowning inside her.
“Mission accomplished, Commander,” Laffey said to her palm. The Commander had seen none of what had happened, and he could only imagine what she meant by those words. He tried calling her again, as he had been for half an hour now, but she had long since silenced her phone to keep him from disturbing her.
“I'm going out for breakfast now. Talk to you later.” She pulled on her socks and her boots. Down on her foot, the tiny humans were thrust into total darkness, and when she stood and her sole clapped against the floor, a powerful BOOM reverberated all throughout the inside of her boot. Now Laffey softly splayed her toes and looked down at her foot. She hoped it wasn't too stuffy in there for those little guys. “Maybe I should have thought of a better place to put you guys,” she muttered. Now she wouldn't be able to wash that part of her foot again, at least not until she could figure out something else to do with them.
Well, that was a worry for some other time; right now, she was just focused on getting breakfast, and she left her room on the way to the cafeteria without sparing another thought for the thousands at her feet.
Though no one was hurt by her walk, still the thundering booms of her steps was terrifying. Their instincts screamed at them to run for cover, but in this utter darkness they were blind as bats and couldn't run for more than a few steps before the fear of running to their deaths paralyzed them. There was nothing for them to do but to lie or sit on the ground and huddle together for comfort, praying for their lives to be spared. Some silently stroked the warm, leathery ground, as if in doing so they could transmit their pleas of mercy to this girl whose foot was now their world.
By the time Laffey had reached the cafeteria and sat down with her meal, finally giving the humans a break from all the booming, her foot had warmed considerably and was starting to sweat. Only in little droplets, easily absorbed by her fresh cotton socks, but between her toes it spread all over her skin, becoming a growing swamp of sweat and dirt to hold all the tiny humans. It was only ankle-deep when she stopped walking, and didn't grow much higher while Laffey was sitting still, but the threat of it pushed the humans to look for safety, and using their phones as flashlights they figured out which way was up and started trekking that way, to the top of her toes where there would be less sweat to worry about.
After some ten minutes they were wading knee-deep in Laffey's sweat, but it only grew shallower from there as they reached an area with lower sweat gland density. Even so, the air was growing warmer and more humid by the second, sapping away their strength, so with their last bits of phone battery the various groups of shrunken humans made their way into one wrinkle or another of Laffey's skin to seek shelter there. And as, one by one, the lights went out again, they were left to contemplate what the future held for them on this shipgirl's foot.
The Commander, meanwhile, was still sitting in his car on Laffey's palm, waiting for his chance to reach her again. He'd put away his phone for now, not wanting to waste the last sliver of battery on a bunch of calls that Laffey was likely to hang up on. She said she would talk to him later, so he'd just have to trust that she remembered this time. And, luckily, she did.
After breakfast, when Laffey set foot inside her room again, she held her hand open. “You can call me again now, Commander,” she said to it, and after a little while he did.
“Laffey, you said you took care of the city, right?”
“That's right. You want to see all the people?”
“No, that's alright. I trust you,” he said. In truth, though, he feared the worst and was too scared to see what destruction Laffey had wrought. He didn't want to learn that the shipgirl had crushed half the city or more—what good would it even do to know a thing like that? It wasn't like there was anything he could do to change it. All the other shrunken victims would just have to take care of themselves. “Listen, now that they're safe, I need you to go to our scientists and tell them what happened to us. Promise me that. I'm almost out of phone battery; I probably don't have enough to explain it all to them, so you'll have to do it for me. They need to know what happened to us. Even if they can't grow us back”—it scared him to think that he might spend the rest of his life like this, but he couldn't pretend it wasn't a real possibility—“maybe they'll be able to prevent something like this from happening again.”
“Will do, Commander. Is there anything else?” Laffey asked.
“Just... whatever happens, take care of me and the others, alright?”
“Alright. I'll go tell the science team, then,” Laffey said. There was still no hint of urgency in her voice—she probably couldn't even imagine what it was like for him and the others to be so utterly tiny—but at least she sounded sincere about doing what he asked. And, as his phone finally gave out, there was nothing left for him to do but to wait.
-----
Laffey greeted the soft morning light that filtered through her bedroom curtains with a yawn and a stretch. She opened her eyes to stare sleepily at the ceiling, then rolled onto her side, snuggling back into her pillow. Her hand lay on the bed on front of her, and as she looked at the center of her palm, she gently curled her fingers over it, as if to hold something unseen. “Good morning, Commander,” she whispered to it, then splayed and softly wiggled her toes on her left foot. “Good morning, everyone.”
A year had passed since the tiny city had appeared in her room. True to her word, Laffey had informed the science team about the Commander and all that had happened to him and the others. No one believed her at first, but when they finally looked at her palm through their microscopes and found a speck-sized Commander standing there and waving desperately at them, their eyes almost bulged out of their heads. At once they started trying to figure out how this had happened to them and how to reverse their shrinking; in the meantime, it had been decided that the Commander and all the other shrunken humans were to be left in Laffey's care, as it was too dangerous to move them elsewhere.
From that day forward, protecting those people was Laffey's only task. She no longer had to take part in combat or even training since it was considered too dangerous for the tiny people. She was free to do whatever she pleased, which basically meant a lot of napping, playing games, browsing the web, and reading her manga—in hindsight, maybe it had been a stroke of luck that the tiny people had happened upon such a sleepy person as their caretaker.
Slowly she kicked the covers off her leg and brought her foot around to peer at it. She could see nothing still, at least not without the powerful magnifying glass the science team had given her to help keep track of her tiny guests, but still she liked to look at her toes and wonder at how many people now called that place “home”. The humans, for their part, welcomed the warm glow of her eyes. After living with her for so long, they were no longer as frightened of their colossal caretaker as they once were. They had long since grown used to the sight of her immense body, the earthquakes from her wiggling toes, the all-encompassing smell of her foot, and the booming of her voice. It had been hard to adjust, but now life went on as it had before. People ate and drank what they found on her skin, went to work, and even started families, most of them having long since resigned themselves to their new existence as germs on the shipgirl's foot.
Only the Commander refused to give up, trusting that his science team would one day find a way to fix this and give him back his life. Why, just last week he had heard them say they were making progress. Of course, they had been saying the same thing since they first started researching it a year ago... but that simply meant they must be getting close now, right? Of course. They had to be, he thought, standing in the shadow of Laffey's fingertip and looking out at her looming face
Because if they couldn't put him back to normal—if he knew that he had to spend the rest of his life on this endless expanse of skin, hiding out in the recesses of Laffey's palm with no more company than that of her godly, looming face hanging over him or towering over the horizon—he was starting to think he might just go mad.
Giantess World
