Chapter 14  
 
Laura was back on her feet, her point of view back to the privileged position where she could see the world around her for miles. Her right hand was extended just in front of her chest, holding three dozen of her recent lovers on it. She did not know too well what she would do with them, but she had decided that she wanted to keep them around for a while more and she did not see why she should not have her way.
 
Laura was perfectly aware that she had derailed a lot. From the Sun’s position she judged that it was probably early afternoon already, which meant that she had been in the city for hours without actually accomplishing anything remarkable.
 
Well, that last statement was probably too modest. She had actually accomplished a lot of amazing things, deeds only available to her and her newfound size and strength. But the truth was that she was not much closer to taking over the world than she had when she had straddled the highway at the entrance of the city and told everyone about her intentions.
 
There had been a point to her actions so far, of course. And they were, actually, useful. Even if a simplistic external observer could have confused them with showing off, the truth was that Laura had made progress in two very important areas, setting a solid foundation for what she had to do next: she had tested her new condition and power and she had proven it to the world. In the process she had also indulged herself, much more than she had ever thought she would.
 
In any case, it was time to move forward. The world had already learned about her, so it was time to get more methodical and to the point. There was something she needed to do first, though. Something she had postponed for too long. Laura had promised herself that she would share her privilege with Stacy, but truth be told, she had been incredibly self-centered so far. It was time to correct that.
 
Raising her palm, she smiled at the people on it and said:
 
“We’re going to meet someone. I’m sure you’ll like her”
 
Laura realized she was just in the opposite side of the city from where she had to go. It was not as if this would be a big problem, but even with her size, it would take her a few minutes to get to her destination. She took a couple of steps down the avenue, purposefully moving in the right direction.
 
She was way gentler on her way out than she had been on her way in. Laura slightly blushed when she noticed for the first time the massive trail of destruction she had left behind when moving from the Strauss Center to the spot where she had intercepted the maglev in a rush. She forced herself to block any potential feeling of guilt. In her mind there was no difference between that and anything she had done before, and she had already accepted that stuff like this would happen just because she was around and she was massive. And she was not going to trade that off.
 
Laura stopped four blocks later. She was not trying to tamper with the minds of the crowd in her hand, but she now knew how to read their emotions. It was not as if she would have needed this ability to realize about their fear. It was very obvious.
 
This was not the reason she had stopped, though. She had tried to ignore something for a while, but she could not do it anymore. Twitching her nose, she sniffed and then raised her arm higher. The smell was evident, and it was not precisely like roses.
 
Laura kept getting surprised by the way her new body worked.
 
She did not feel any hunger but she had to (or at least could) pee. She definitely had sexual urges, even more than usual. And apparently, whatever it was that made pheromones and sweat was still working, and at a grand scale.
 
The Sun was shining, the day was hot and Laura had been both exerting herself and being very liberal in taking care of her sexual needs. This had unavoidably had consequences, and she could now smell them.
 
If the combination of sweat and love juices was noticeably to her, Laura wondered how it must be feeling for those around her, especially those in her hand. She decided not to ask them. As stupid as it was, she was mildly embarrassed by the situation. It was not as if she cared at all about what the centimeter-tall people thought about her, but there was no need to make a conversation topic out of it.
 
There was someone whose opinion Laura cared about, though. And she was precisely on her way to visit her.
 
Laura frowned as she thought about the situation. This immediately raised the panic level in her hand, making her chuckle instead.
 
“Oh God, you guys are so impressible” she said, half amused and half frustrated.
 
She was not in the mood to pay a lot of attention to them, though, so she just moved her hand lower and thought about her problem. She did not want to be smelly when she met Stacy for the first time in her new condition. She wanted to look sexy. And well, why not admitting it, she wanted to look godly. She wanted Stacy to realize that she was the luckiest person in the world, aside from Laura herself, and she did not want anything to spoil it.
 
So, she would need to take care about the issue. The problem, of course, was that there were not many showers around able to hold someone of her stature.
 
Laura looked around from her vantage point of view. It did not take her long to realize that there was only one choice that would be both close and convenient: the ocean.
 
Raising her hand to her face again, she realized that she would not be able to take her new passengers with her. It made her frown once more, frustrated. Up to a point, Laura felt like a little girl not being able to have her way. She did not know what she wanted to make out of her captives, but she had wanted to take them and it made her upset to have to part with them so soon. In any case, it was a matter of priorities.
 
Without further warning to them, Laura made a left, changing her direction and heading straight towards the sea. It was less than twenty blocks away, nothing by her new standards. Needless to say, her sudden change of pace ended up with a new score of collateral victims of her steps, but Laura was not even paying attention to them now.
 
She reached the beachfront blocks soon enough and stopped. Then, feeling a little mean as a consequence of not being able to have her way completely, she raised her palm to her face once more and said:
 
“Wait for me here. Try to flee and I will get very, very, very angry with you. Understood?”
 
She had to suppress a grin when she felt a sudden spike in the general level of fear coming from her palm. She then moved it down and turned it with care, creating a slope and emptying the group of people on it on the roof of the tallest building in the area. Some of them seemed to have got hurt, something unavoidable when the difference in scale was the one it was, but Laura did not care too much. There did not seem to be any serious victims.
 
Quickly forgetting about her former passengers, she faced the beach, which was much emptier than what the date and temperature should have suggested.
 
Her toes were soon touching the warm water of the Pacific Ocean. A dozen steps later, the normally deep waters were only reaching up to mid-calf. Laura realized that she would need to get quite far away if she wanted to achieve her objectives. She turned by the time the water had already reached all the way to her crotch and saw that the city was much farther away than she would have thought. Frowning, she kept on wading.
 
She stopped when the waterline reached her breasts. The city was still visible in the background, but everything looked so small from the distance that it felt as if it would take her hours to get back to it, rather than the minutes she rationally knew she would need.
 
There was no point on thinking about distances and depths, though. They were what they were, and in any case, they were a testament to her size. Walking a few minutes to clean herself was a perfectly acceptable trade-off in exchange for the ultimate power, was it not?
 
Of course, there was no soap. That was another of the trade-offs she would need to face, unless she reached a point where she could force people to make a large enough quantity to cover her needs. That point would come, she was sure, but just not yet. Laura had to prevent a chuckle when she thought on the movie Fight Club. She hoped the tinies would find a better way of making the amount of soap she would need other than that, since her body count was already large enough as it was.
 
In any case, there was no point in thinking about the future. The situation was the one it was, so Laura just crouched and started rubbing her body under the water, cleaning her skin, removing the dirt and gore and refreshing it.
 
She had not realized about how hot the sun had been until now. Laura enjoyed the bath, beyond its original purpose, letting the water cool her skin. She was glad that the whimsical process behind her growth seemed to have given her skin the ability to take a whole lot of direct exposition to the run rays without getting burnt. Realizing that she was actually getting nicely tanned in the process was an even better discovery.
 
It had been a while since the last moment she had stopped to think about her change rather than in what to do with her new condition. Cooled and relaxed as she was, it seemed like a good moment to let her mind wander a little, though.
 
Laura had been dreaming about becoming an all-powerful giantess for what seemed like forever. She was far from the only woman with that fantasy, as the larger than expected online community proved her, but she soon realized that she had put much more thought into her dream than any of the women and men she had interacted to.
 
For most of the people she had known virtually, it was all about sexual satisfaction. Not for Laura. Of course, sexuality played an important role in her fantasy, as a commercial jetliner and a maglev train had proven. But to Laura it was not exclusively about that. She had gone much further in her vision.
 
To her, becoming a giantess had many more implications than just her arousal. It was, actually, a political statement. Laura looked at the world and did not like what she saw. It was going from bad to worse, and no one seemed to be able to change its course. She had very clear ideas on what needed changing and also enough judgment to know that there was no way she would be able to implement them… unless she managed to muster enough power for it.
 
She soon found out that her political views blended in really well with her giantess fetish. She was very aware of her origins and her possibilities. There was no way she would be able to make it to the top in the world’s corrupt political system, and even if by some miracle she did, she also knew that this was far from a guarantee to push her agenda forward.
 
Changing the world would require mustering the strength of a global superpower. Becoming the president of the USA would not do it, though. Too many people would work against her. The same would happen with any other country of choice. This left her with a single option only: becoming a global superpower herself.
 
Letting herself fall backwards and submerging her entire body into the water of the Pacific Ocean, Laura smiled as she opened her eyes and enjoyed the colors and shapes the light from the Sun drew after refracting at the surface.
 
There was no doubt that she had got everything she had wished for. Twenty-four hours earlier Laura Anderson had been an average girl, living a mostly average life, with her sexual orientation as her most remarkable difference from the average. Now she held the equivalent political and military strength of a global superpower. Even without testing herself to the max, Laura was convinced that she had become more powerful than the rest of humanity together.
 
“How did this all happen?” Laura then wondered as she kept her body submerged, not feeling short of breath for the time being.
 
The thought had been bugging her for most of the day, but it was actually the first time she articulated the question like that.
 
She had everything she had ever wished for… and then some more. Her height perfectly matched her preferences. Her strength had proven to be as limitless as she had always desired and there was no doubt in her mind that she was completely invulnerable. All she had done had been to go trekking and to fall asleep in her perfect spot in the valley. She doubted that sleeping under the canopy of stars was a good enough qualification for growth.
 
She had not done anything to have her dreams come true. In fact, she knew that it was physically impossible for her to be that big and still walk and breathe. And yet… she was.
 
It did not stop there: the apparent lack of need for nourishment definitely worked very well for someone of her condition while being able to pee even if she had felt no thirst during the day had also proven convenient. Far from being an issue, feeling sexually aroused was actually welcome. The initial drive behind her fantasy had been, after all, sexual, so it was fitting that she could enjoy this aspect of her transformation too.
 
It was too perfect, now that she thought about it. Her senses had become keener, she had quickly mastered the balance of strength that she would need to interact with the world… and she had recently found that her physical abilities seemed to be matched by her newly discovered mental powers. Powers she had not even dreamed about but that she was sure would work very well for her intentions.
 
The only minor inconvenience of her transformation so far seemed to be the fact that her body was still secreting substances with odor, such as sweat, vaginal juices or pheromones. It was definitely minor… and Laura wondered if there would not be a purpose behind it as well.
 
In a nutshell, all her dreams had come true with amazing precision, and she had not done anything to make that happen. Or, at least, she had not done anything consciously.
 
“Either I am the luckiest person alive or there is something else going on here” she finally concluded.
 
What were the odds of someone growing? Well, scientifically they were zero. Add to that the fact that it had happened to her, who had longed for it, and exactly in the way she had wished and there was no way this could be a coincidence.
 
But, if it was not a random event, then what was it?
 
There were only two possibilities that came to mind.
 
The first one was the “mind over matter” approach, the belief that somehow her mind had managed to transcend its limits and turn her into what she had always wanted. It was hard to believe, of course.
 
The second one was even harder, considering Laura was a fierce atheist. It was the “divine intervention” possibility. She liked this one less, since it basically implied the existence of an entity that was more powerful than her. After all, if something had managed to grant her wish, that same something could take it away from her, couldn’t it?
 
This last thought unsettled her a little, but feeling relaxed in the water she quickly realized that her concerns were unfounded. If her current state was purely a result of her will there was nothing to fear, of course. But neither there was in the event of a divine entity having granted it to her.
 
If anyone or anything were powerful enough to do this, they also knew her motivations. So, if they had granted her wish to her that could only mean that they wanted her to act like she had.
 
This last thought unavoidably sent her mind into a tour through her actions of the day. Laura removed any tension from her muscles and let her body float, pushed by Archimedes’ Law. Staying still, she was thrilled to feel how her body, colossal by any measure and weighting hundreds of thousands of tons, could keep itself afloat without any movement. Keeping her arms and legs open, Laura found out that she could actually hold that position without any effort on her part. She could not prevent a chuckle. The thought of what was happening was exhilarating. Of course, cruise ships, aircraft carriers and oil tankers managed to float just as she was, but this did not make the experience any less surprising.
 
Letting her body go as it floated and took the bright rays of the Sun once more, she focused on her adventure so far. With the adrenaline pumping through her bloodstream now at normal levels and feeling more relaxed than she had at any other moment in the day, images of her morning in Emerald flashed through her brain.
 
Laura was definitely megalomaniacal, but she had never been delusional, so looking at the events from the distance it soon was evident that she had been fooling herself. She might have become arrogant with the tinies (how not to?), but she could not be so arrogant as to cheat herself.
 
Suddenly, all her illusions of being a fair-minded goddess, showing the necessary restraint to use her astronomical power for the greater good became that: illusions.
 
She had stepped on thousands of people. Tens of thousands, actually. And as deadly as this had been, it was probably the most justifiable use of her new scale. After all, she had had to move.
 
Looking back in perspective, not everything else was so easy to rationalize. She refused to feel bad for Strauss, as cruel as that had been, but that aide, she had also killed a few people in cold blood. They had not been that many, if she compared them to the ones that had perished just so that she could walk, but still many more than what would have made a normal-sized woman become the worst mass murdered in the history of the country.
 
Then, there had been those that had died in the several buildings she had brought down just to make a point. Hell, plenty of people had probably died after she had peed on them.
 
And, of course, there were the ones that had given their lives so that she could satisfy her sexual urges.
 
Laura tried to imagine how all that must have looked and felt from the perspective of one of the tiny persons she aspired to rule. She found out that she could not. It was curious how quickly and easily she had detached from her previous self. In any case, she rationally knew that it had probably been horrible. Monstrous. She felt the weight of the judgment of her actions by billions of people. As she did that, her mind returned to the moment her vaginal muscles had crushed the crowded plane she had used as a dildo.
 
For an instant Laura felt some weight on her chest. The images in her mind seemed to rewind and the plane’s fuselage collapsed like tinfoil once more as she reached her climax. Laura panted, feeling short of breath. A battle started in the back of her mind. Her body tensed, ending the peaceful float she had enjoyed over the last minute. Laura kicked and soon found solid footing, easily reaching the ocean’s bed with her upper torso and head still comfortably above the waterline.
 
She took a deep breath. And suddenly, something snapped in her subconscious. Her breathing accelerated at first, but the cadence of her inhales and exhales started slowing down almost as quickly as it had accelerated. In less than a minute, she was standing still in the middle of the Pacific, her stance perfectly calm.
 
If someone had been around, he would have heard her muttering:
 
“Why shouldn’t I?”
 
And like this,   with a simple sentence, uttered after a just a few minutes of mental debate, Laura’s approach to her condition and to the world had changed forever.
 
The confrontation taking place at her head had been brief but intense. Suddenly facing everything she had done since waking up turned into a goddess, Laura felt like a fraud for an instant. She had examined her actions and had called herself what she had been: a hypocrite, preaching grand intentions while using her power selfishly and to cause death and destruction without specific purpose.
 
The thought had anguished her… until she had realized about another obvious truth. There was only one person she responded to, and it was no other than herself.
 
In case her growth had been the product of her mind’s will, this truth was unquestionable. But even of someone else had been involved on it, the fact that she had been left on her own to do as she pleased for so long and after the many displays of arbitrary use of power she had gone through told her that whoever was behind her current condition was fine with her doing as she was.
 
This knowledge, together with the certainty that there was nothing the tiny population of the world could do to stop her made Laura herself the only judge of her actions.
 
And when the pressure on her chest had started to become unbearable, her mind unlocked the solution to it.
 
“Why shouldn’t I?” she had asked to herself, standing in the middle of the Pacific.
 
The pressure was gone in an instant. And so was a mask Laura had been wearing the entire morning and that she had now got rid of with a simple shrug.
 
By the end of her mental struggle, Laura finally come to terms with her true psychology. She wanted to take over the world. And she loved being gigantic. She had longed for both things for a long time, but while they blended in really well, they were not necessarily related.
 
In more recent times her mind had built an elaborate scheme where her political ambitions and her giantess fantasy were related. By doing that she had been able to build a reasoning behind her fetish while, at the same time, finding a way out for her illusions of power. And once she had woken up, finding herself in the spot she had always longed for, she had played by those rules she had built for herself.
 
Laura now realized that those rules had been constraining her during the entire morning, inhibiting her from doing what she wanted. A quick reminiscence of her sexual games at the airport or with the trains made her reformulate that last thought, though. She had actually done quite a bit of stuff, but it was not nearly all that had come to mind. And she had had to invest a considerable amount of time to rationalize it afterwards.
 
Well, not anymore.
 
Once she had realized that she was the only reason behind her inhibitions, the solution presented itself to Laura. All she had to do was to permanently activate a mental switch that had always been there but she had seldom used.
 
She repeated the sentence:
 
“Why shouldn’t I?”
 
She was louder this time. It made no difference. There was no one around.
 
And, as simple as that, Laura Anderson decided that she was going to use her size and power as she pleased and that she did not care about the consequences.
 
It was an inflexion point. The inflexion point. Laura smiled, then looked at the around her, observing the world from a new mentality.
 
From her vantage point of view she found the trails in the water soon enough. It was easy enough to find the ships they belonged too. There was a varied collection of them: fishing boats, tankers, cargo ships. The fact that they were so close together could only mean one thing: they had packed to try to flee from her, their original courses probably taking them too close to the spot where she was.
 
Laura felt a sudden urge to play with them, as if they were mere bathtub toys. Her smile widened and she muttered:
 
“Why shouldn’t I?”
 
 
 
 
“She broke from her restraints” Laya said.
 
“It was about time she did” Quo replied.
 
“You were expecting it?” Laya asked.
 
“Of course”
 
“I thought we had chosen this specific individual because of her morals” Laya said.
 
“I did”
 
“I’m afraid I don’t understand” Laya said.
 
“It’s all part of the process. She’s not done yet” Quo replied.
 
Laya looked at her mentor, visibly puzzled.
 
“Her morals will come into play. They are actually related to what I care the most about her: her purpose” Quo stated.