Chapter 9

Jorien grew. And grew. She saw the Chase Tower getting smaller than her, but she didn't stop. She wanted to teach the tinies at her feet a lesson. Building towers bigger than her! The cheek!

She shot up, gaining dozens of feet per second. But she didn't stop. She kept growing, more and more. She was going to be the biggest, hugest, most gigantic creature ever.

Her boots obliterated entire houses as she reached 1500 feet. Hands on her hips, smiling gleefully, Jorien accelerated her growth. Now she gained hundreds of feet each second, her shadow eclipsing more and more of Houston.

The people stood frozen, like a deer in a car's headlight, as she gained 2000 feet. Life in Houston was halted, everyone looked up at the still growing giantess, who was now 4000 feet and didn't slow down. On the contrary, she accelerated her growth again, letting her boots do the destruction work.

Without even moving her feet!

Jorien gained one mile, her enormous soles now shoved aside entire city blocks, breaking skyscrapers in half like toothpicks and steamrolling over an entire park.

Two miles. An army, sent in to kill her, witnessed the already huge woman expand even further, but now at an accelerating speed. Soldiers weren't simply crushed under her feet, as they feared. They were simply ran over by her expanding soles. The clefts in her rubbery soles could contain several men, as if they were small caves in a mountainside. Tanks were smashed flat against her footwear as it hit them, and fighters and bombers splattered against her body like insects against the windshield of a speeding train.
Jorien never knew about the army. She was too big to notice and focusing on growth anyway.

Three miles. The tip of her boots, bended upwards a little, now stood so far from the ground that an entire neighborhood could be placed under it, large houses and all. Jorien sighted, inhaling in her lungs an entire layer of clouds, turning the until then gloomy weather to sunny.

Six miles. Jorien concentrated harder. She was now gaining roughly one mile each five seconds, but didn't want to stop growing. People had to die from panic, from a woman gaining more and more height.
Her favorite fantasy entered her mind suddenly, as if someone told her to remind it. She was again making career in her thoughts, but now she was so powerful that an entire city was nothing to her anymore. Like a monarch of old, whose word was law, she ruled entire countries in her mind. An entire empire, all hers. And that exciting thought quickened her growth even more.

Jorien was 25 miles now. Each second, she gained two miles, large parts of Houston were destroyed already. She stood over the city, even with her legs slightly departed she had no trouble placing one foot left and the other one right of Houston.

100 miles. Jorien could see space, but somehow she was still able to breathe. She saw the curvation of the Earth, the Atlantic ocean, half of the continent. "All mine", she thought, still rising.

200 miles. Finally she stopped her growth. Houston was no more than a small speck of gray between her endlessly long legs and 27-mile long feet.

Bending down, she dug her huge hands in the ground, one on either side of Houston. Like a vast, half-buried stone, she tore the entire city from the ground. Standing up again, she lifted it to her face. She held an entire city in her hands!

As she scanned Houston, she saw the tiny skyscrapers that still stood pointing up like needles in a cushion. Focusing her eyes, she managed to make out microscopic houses and streets thinner than a hair. Little specks of green that where parks.

"What would the people think?", she wondered. Being almost 200 miles up in the air, completely at the mercy of her, Jorien, career woman. Power. She had power. Nothing on Earth could rival her. Her toes were higher than mountain ranges. The deepest ocean nothing but a shallow puddle to her. A rain forest a small patch of moss. She was now more than just a human, much, much more than a powerful person. She was a goddess, one who cared nothing of the lives of the puny, tiny human race anymore. What was the wealthiest man on Earth to her? The most powerful politician? The strongest dictator? Nothing! They all were the same specks, too small to be seen by her. She was like a scientist looking at bacteria through a microscope, not able to distinguish one of the many dots from the other.
Why should she even care about cities, who were nothing but a patches of brown, gray and white from her height? Patches between many other patches, some green, some yellow.
Even civilization meant nothing to her anymore. Laws and moral were meaningless to her. Worries and banter of germs, whose cities they build over so many centuries could be destroyed by her in a split second. All she had to do was to place her foot on one of these blots, and gone they were. Turning towards the city in her hands, she spoke.

"Houston, you've got a problem," Jorien said and grinned with a wicked look in the eyes.

Then, she crushed the city like she was making a wad of a paper sack. Houston crumbled, buildings rained down, to her in slow motion, along Jorien's huge, huge body. Tons and tons of dirt and debris made nothing more than a few small stains on her T-shirt.

Wiping off the remains of Houston, Jorien scanned the landscape. Nothing but patches of brown, green and gray. From her height, it looked like a picture from a satellite, as she had seen on the internet sometimes. Jorien reveled in her newfound power. She was the biggest, hugest, most colossal being ever! She took a step, and deliberately placed her foot on a patch of gray. She knew it was a city, and she stepped on it out of sheer pleasure.

"An entire city! I crushed an entire city in a single step! All those houses, people and whatever more is destroyed by me, under my foot!" she thought, excited.

"I am so powerful, nothing can be compared by me! A mountain is nothing more than a small rock! I can wade through the oceans! I am a goddess!"

Jorien thought of the stories about giants she heard as a young girl. These giants were hardly ten times the size of a human, as far as she remembered.

"Giants, ha! To me, they are mites like the tiny humans down there...I can't even see the difference," she thought gleefully. "Were is Paul Bunyan? The one that made the Grand Canyon and Mount Hood? The 10,000 lakes? What is he compared to me? I can make a canyon many times the size of the Grand Canyon by merely dragging my pinky finger, not an axe, over the ground! I level Mount Hood by pressing it down in the ground with nothing but my thumb! My footsteps create seas, not mere lakes! Paul Bunyan's size varies from story to story, but even in the story in which he has the biggest size, he is nothing to me! A speck of lint under my pinky toenail! That is Paul Bunyan to me even when he is twice as "huge" as a tale-spinner has ever made him."

Jorien sighted with happiness at that thought. The gigantic lumberjack, a piece of dust on her shoe, a flea on one of her hairs, a grain of sand she could wipe away from her eyelashes by mere blinking.

"I AM GIGANTIC! I AM COLOSSAL! I AM A GODDESS!!! " she suddenly cried out. Half the American continent heard it.

"And now, it's time to show you an insignificant small piece of my power," Jorien concluded. To the horror of millions of people, she started to walk.