WARNING: Just want to give everyone a disclaimer before reading, this is a very violent and evil story. The first 3 chapters will be pretty cruel, but the last two are easily the most sadistic stuff I've ever written. Like the only reason I wrote something this brutal was because it was a commission, and even then I don't think I could handle writing a full-length story in this style even if someone paid me, it'd be too depressing for me lmao. So yeah, if you've ever read a story on here and had to quit because it was too much for you, I definitely would recommend you avoid this one. All my other stuff is much more tame and happy :)

But if you DO like cruel stories, this'll be right up your alley...

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     For several days, Jonathan and Kyle had been stuck inside Danielle’s boots.

     The pair of friends had been out hiking together when they suddenly found themselves instantly shrunken in the middle of the park trail. Before they’d even had time to mentally process what had just happened to them, a giant shoe had landed next to them. In a fright, they’d turned around just in time to see a tall blonde woman pulling her foot out of the sneaker, and a hand descend from the heavens to pick their little two inch bodies up. For a brief moment, they flew through the air, until the giant fingers that had been holding them suddenly let go and they started to fall, landing roughly in the sole of the shoe. And then the girl’s giant foot, not even wearing any socks, plunged down upon them and settled on top of their bodies, snugly pinning the two of them between her arch and the shoe’s insole, before she started jogging once again on her way home.

     But that was days ago. And ever since Danielle had returned to her apartment with her little magically shrunken toys, she’d been keeping them in her leather boots. She’d had them for years, and she wore them almost everywhere. Her tennis shoes were the only other pair of shoes she regularly used, since she couldn’t work out in her boots. But for every other occasion—work, weddings, shopping with friends, or even just lounging around the house—she wore her old black boots. Even during times when they’d gotten worn out, she’d take them to a cobbler and get them fixed, so by this point in her life she felt like they were practically a part of her.

     Jonathan and Kyle had been far from her first pair of captives though. As long as she’d had the boots, she’d also used them as a ‘home’ for the strangers she liked to shrink. Sometimes they’d only last for a few hours in her shoes before they got squashed to death, or sometimes she’d keep them around for months at a time, always doing her best to make sure they’d never escape from the tall, thick walls of their prison. For ones who lasted that long, they’d have to live off of Danielle’s feet; breathing in the tainted air, drinking up her salty sweat, and even eating whatever bits of dead skin and toejam that they could scrounge for sustenance. A lot of the shrunken people were fighters, with a strong will to survive, and therefore willing to do anything to last another day. Hopeful that somehow they might find freedom. But they never did. The only liberation that Danielle ever bestowed upon her slaves was the sweet release of death. That was the fate she had in mind for the two men she’d found on her run a few days ago. She’d had a stressful day at work, and was itching to be able to take it out on them. But she wanted to play with them first.

     “OK boys, listen up,” she announced, propping her feet up on her coffee table and crossing her ankles. Jonathan was in her left boot, twisted uncomfortably around her grimy toes, while Kyle was trapped upside down under her arch, his legs pinned by the ball of her foot. “The good news is that I’ve decided today that I’m gonna be dishing out a little bit of freedom. But the bad news is it will only be for one of you. So someone gets to walk out of here and return to their normal life… but the other one has to be my stress reliever.” She let the news of their fate hang in the air before adding, “Which means death, by the way. I’m gonna kill one of you,” she giggled, but started laughing harder once she felt the two boys begin to frantically squirm out of fear. “So you both have 60 seconds to prove that you should be the one to go free and your friend should be the one to die. Remember what I taught you guys yesterday about worshipping my feet? I hope you two were listening well, because that’s the grading criteria. So are you ready…?” But before she could even say ‘go,’ she felt two tiny tongues quickly start anxiously lapping and licking away. Jonathan’s tongue slathered Danielle’s sweaty toes as if he was starving, while Kyle planted dozens of minuscule kisses along her foot. Neither of them were willing to be the sacrifice for each other, so there was no hesitation in their spirit as they worshipped their giant goddess, unaware of how they were each doing but hoping they put on the better show. They ignored Danielle’s cackling laughter as she enjoyed how miserable she knew they felt, until finally a minute had passed and she ordered them to stop. Kyle thought it’d be best to obey her and immediately quit his kissing, but Jonathan was seemingly in a state of delirium, and kept licking at her huge toes, desperate to be the winner. “Lefty, I told you, 60 seconds is up.” But he just kept licking mindlessly, until Danielle rolled her eyes brought her feet off the table, lifting her left foot up high and slamming it into the floor as hard as she could. Instantly, Jonathan’s body exploded beneath her toes, a pathetically small mess of blood and guts that had just refused to listen. 

     Kyle heard the stomp, and his heart raced with hope. He felt Danielle’s foot lift away from him, and her clear blue eyes peered down into his hole. “So did I win?” he asked, speaking for the first time in days.

     She scrunched up her face with disgust, “No, of course not. All you did was kiss my feet, kissing isn’t anything special, couples do it all the time. Jonathan was licking away like there was no tomorrow. Unfortunately for him though, he also wasn’t willing to listen, so he ruined his chance.” Kyle’s heart sank as he felt the boot start to rotate, as Danielle lifted it up and turned it sideways, and Kyle fell tumbling out and into her other boot, where Jonathan had been. “But you’re still the loser,” she explained, “which means you have to die too. I’ll at least let you say goodbye though.” She jutted her bottom lip out, pretend pouting as she watched Kyle crawl forward and discovered the lifeless mess of his best friend, smeared into the goddess’ insole. He broke down crying, falling to his knees as Danielle smirked and let her foot enter into the boot. Kyle didn’t even bother to fight back as the girl’s stinking, blood-stained sole crept up on him from above, slowly pushing down on his head. Kyle’s muscles gave out and he crumpled into the remains of his friend, one last tear falling down his face as his world was filled with the smell of guts, leather, and foot sweat, while Danielle merely laughed and continued pressing down, until Kyle’s body had suffered the same fate as his friend’s.

     Danielle was driving along a rural highway one night, looking for more people she’d be able to shrink down. It was a regular occurrence for her, and she didn’t have to drive long before she’d be able to find someone stopped on the side of the road for one reason or another. Eventually she spotted a pair of flashing lights, and she pulled over behind a minivan to find a man and a woman kneeling at the car’s left rear wheel, attempting to fix a flat tire.

     “Oh, thank goodness someone finally came along,” the woman smiled with relief, as the man looked up to assess Danielle as she stepped out of her car. As she approached the couple, she was able to see into the back seat of the car, where a teenage boy and girl sat, curiously looking out the window to see if the stranger had come to help. All in all, they were the perfect, classic family unit. Which made them the perfect prey.

     All that Danielle had to do was wave her hand, and immediately the man found himself shrinking down, his crowbar falling away as he shrunk down to only several inches in height. The woman screamed, and the boy in the car immediately got out of the car and ran around to see what had happened, and defend his mom if need be. His face displayed the same shock as his mom as he stopped dead in his tracks, seeing his minuscule father struggling to stand in on the giant gravel terrain. The boy’s reaction was swifter than his mother’s, and with a confused but enraged face, he turned to Danielle, and began to swing a punch at her, before she waved her hand again with a giggle and he too found himself shrinking down.

     The mother had started crying, regarding to the young woman with terror as she fell to the ground, backing away but not fully thinking straight. “What—what is this? What do you…w-want,” she stuttered.

     Danielle turned to the girl in the car, “Hey, you need to get out here too.” The girl didn’t fully understand what was going on, but could tell that something had happened to her dad and brother. Adrenaline took over her brain, and she complied with the command out of fear that something might happen to her or her mom if she didn’t comply. So she opened the car door and got out, careful not to step on her dad. “Stand up,” she told the mom, before raising her hand as if to threaten someone else getting shrunken, and the woman quickly stood up, clutching her daughter in a hug. “Now, both of you take off one of your shoes.” To the mother and daughter, this request didn’t seem as scary, so they did as they were told, the mom slipping off her tennis shoes while the daughter took off one of her converse sneakers. “And the socks.” They obeyed the second order as well, just as it began to dawn on the daughter what was happening. Danielle laughed as she could tell from the girl’s expression that she realized what they were about to do, but evidently the mom hadn’t caught on yet. “I think your daughter understands what’s about to happen. Go on, pick up your dad.” The girl started crying as she picked up her father, whose clothes hadn’t even shrunken with him and was now squirming around naked in the clutches of his teenage daughter. “Aaaaand drop him in your shoe! And then put it back on and tie it up nice and tight.” The man began struggling even harder as the girl obeyed Danielle and slowly lowered her dad into the opening of her shoe.

     “Sorry,” she whispered through tears, before standing back up and slipping her bare foot inside, trying her best not to squish or hurt her dad as he banged his fist against her sole and yelled at her to let him back out. Then she tied her shoe like Danielle had said, and could feel his wriggling lessen as his room to move was compressed inside the sour, musty, and claustrophobic space.

     “You next,” Danielle nodded to the woman, who was shaking more visibly as she walked over to her son and picked him up, wiping some of the tears from her eyes as she did the same, gently depositing him into her tennis shoe. The son knew it was useless to try and fight back, but he ran deeper into his mom’s shoe in hopes that he might have more room at the edge of her toes. What little amount of light was let in by the moon soon disappeared as her toes followed in, their calloused, leathery surface uneasily settling on top of her naked 3-inch son.

     “So, how’s it feel?” Danielle smugly asked the two as she crossed her arms. The girl tried her best to look confident in light of the fact that she was being forced to squish her own father beneath her foot, while the mom kept asking the son if he was doing OK, moving her toes all about on top of his naked body as she tried readjusting his positioning to make him more comfortable. But Danielle’s expression fell as she saw lights in the distance behind them; a car approaching. “Shit…” she muttered, hoping she would’ve been able to have fun with the family for a little while longer, as she waved her hand again over the two people and their car, all of which shrunk down to only a couple inches in height. She pocketed the car to get rid of the evidence, and then slipped her own boots off, picking up the woman and her daughter and tossing them into her boot. The woman hadn’t stopped crying the whole time, but Danielle suddenly heard the girl scream as she came across the messy remains of Jonathan and Kyle, causing the mother’s cries to only strengthen as they both wondered if they were about to die. Danielle had made sure to shrink their clothes as well this time around, so the dad and son of the family—now reduced to only a few millimeters—could still stay trapped in their shoes. And then the smell and heat increased of the cursed leather cavern as Danielle’s foot came entering its domain, silencing their pleas as she turned to get back in her car.

     It was a beautiful, bright Sunday afternoon, and Danielle was riding along with her friend Jezebel on the way to a state park. Jezebel had magic powers too, and was just as cruel, so the two of them loved to go out hunting together and capture new people to torture in their shoes. But today was more special than most of their weekend outings. For one, it was over 90 degrees outside, so while the cool AC was blasting in her face, Danielle had stuck her boots out the window so the hot sun could heat her feet up through the scorching black leather. But besides the weather, the two were excited because they were on their way to a hiking meetup where a lot of people were supposed to be gathered. Every time they shrunk people they ran the risk of someone seeing what they did, so trying to gather up dozens of people in a single outing usually meant using their powers over and over. But being able to find a group of 20 or so people in an area where not many others were around wasn’t an opportunity that happened very often.

     They pulled into the parking area at the base of the mountain, just minutes before the group was about to depart. “Oh, looks like we have some last-minute arrivals!” a bubbly, woman in her 30s announced as a few heads turned towards the newcomers. Jezebel smiled at the woman as she got out of the car, while Danielle walked around and headed towards the back of the group, looking around as well to make sure there wasn’t anyone who might be watching them from far away. 

     An elderly man who was still somewhat in-shape looked at the girls’ choice of shoes: skate shoes and leather boots. “I don’t think they’re with us Darlene,” he said. “Are you guys from the Facebook group?”

     Danielle laughed, “Definitely not,” and then flashed Jezebel a look to let her know they were good to go. With the two girls on either side of the unsuspecting group of hikers, they nodded at each other with smirks and then raised their hands, making wiping gestures in the direction of the crowd. One by one, the various hikers began to dwindle down, their clothes falling on top of them and many of them lying stranded on their sandals or in their own shoes, which always made for easy picking. Just as quickly as the screams and yells had started, they died down again once their voices became too tiny to be noticed, and Danielle and Jezebel went around to all the piles of clothes so they could snatch up the victims writhing around inside before they could run away. And every time they picked up someone new, they’d shrink their clothes as well and stuff them in their pockets to throw away later.

     “I’ve got 11, what about you?” Jezebel asked once the two had met in the middle of the clearing where the people had once stood. 

     “14, I win!” Danielle smiled mischievously, as they both ignored the tiny pleas for mercy from the cup that was carrying the tiny people. Jezebel had taken off her shoes as soon as everyone had shrunk, and alternated between dropping the victims in each one as she went along. But Danielle was different—if she’d taken off her shoes, she would’ve gotten dirt and gravel and other debris on her soles, but she wanted them to be nice and smooth for when she dumped the people inside her boots. Without any special fanfare, Jezebel stuck her shoes back inside her Vans, taking in a deep breath as she enjoyed the feeling of her prey struggling against her hot, sweaty feet. Feeling excited, Danielle sat on the ground and unzipped her own shoes, taking her hot, reddened feet out for the first time in several hours. She coughed and had to recoil from how pungent her own stench was, but it made her heart race as she thought about how up close and personal all her little toys would be. One by one she dropped 7 of her two-inch-tall prey into her left shoe, and then dumped the remaining 7 into her right. Both Jezebel and Danielle laughed as they noticed the screams died down, as many of the people started vomiting from the sudden momentum into the dark, humid dungeon of the evil giant’s boots. “Lucky for you guys, I’m a size 11 and a half, so my feet are nice and big,” Danielle calmly explained to her newest bunch of slaves, “which should mean plenty of room for you guys to crawl around, or do whatever else you little worms wanna do.” Then she lifted her foot and began to slowly descend it into her first boot, teasing her victims with their oncoming fate. One by one, she began to feel all the naked, scrambling bodies make contact with her moist, bare sole, and she shook her boot about to try and evenly disperse them around to various areas of her shoe, before firmly planting her foot down and tying the boot back up. The sounds of panic and helplessness were completely silenced, muffled by the thick leather that absorbed the summer’s heat. After hours of her boots sitting in the sun on the way to the mountain, they were already well past 100 degrees, and her feet were already wet with sweat. There was so much stinking, murky moisture in Danielle’s shoes, that the little shrunken bodies were literally slipping about beneath her massive soles, becoming bathed in her unholy perspiration that they desperately licked up in hopes of quenching their crackling thirst. But that was just the first shoe; Danielle soon turned her attention to her right foot, where her foot repeated the same process. She relished in the anguished cries of the tortured souls as they began cooking like a sauna, struggling just to breathe in some amount of oxygen through the miasma of Danielle’s unwashed grime and stale leather. She zipped up the second boot and stood up, wiggling her toes around inside their hot, stuffy home, as she started sweating so much that she could feel the squishing and squelching of their fidgeting bodies against her insole.

     “Ready to go?” Jezebel asked, and Danielle nodded contentedly with a smile on her face, as the two of them made their way back to the car to speed away from the scene of the crime.

     A few weeks later, Danielle had texted Jezebel about wanting to go hunting again, so Jezebel met up at Danielle’s house so they could leave together. “I gotta use the bathroom before we go,” her friend had said after bursting through the door, rushing through Danielle’s house to go and use the toilet. But when she came back out a few minutes later, she found Danielle standing squarely in the hallway, before suddenly waving her hands in Jezebel’s direction. Her friend gasped as she quickly shrunk down to only a few inches in height, falling backwards in surprise at the sudden betrayal.

     Danielle sighed, a look of genuine sorrow on her face, her leather boots clacking slowly on the wooden floor as she walked towards her shrunken friend. “I’m sorry it had to come to this Jez, but I made the realization a few days ago that we’re just too dangerous for each other. We both love shrinking people too much, so if I hadn’t done this…” she trailed off, squatting down before her friend and picking her up. “Well, it would’ve only been a matter of time until you did it to me. I’m a liability to you and you’re a liability to me. Now just comes the question of what to do with you.” She turned around and carried Jezebel into the kitchen, setting her on the counter and setting an upturned glass around her to make sure she couldn’t escape. Then she grabbed her own cup and filled it with water, taking a drink as she thought about her plan. “Obviously I love squishing people, but you’ve been my friend for so many years that I feel like the least I can do is get rid of you in a more humane way,” she mused, gazing out into her backyard while she thought about what to do. But then she noticed that the blinds on her window were slowly getting taller, and she took a step back to see her entire house was expanding. She whipped around and saw that Jezebel had her hands up and a strained look on her face, desperately trying to shrink Danielle despite her reduced size. But their size difference was just too big, and Jezebel’s magic couldn’t work fast enough on a being that was thousands of times larger than her now. Realizing her friend was trying for a desperate attempt to gain the advantage, she quickly lashed out at the glass, sending it flying across the house and bringing Jezebel’s last-ditch effort to an abrupt halt. 

     “Fucking bitch!” Danielle yelled, stomping over to the shards of glass that surrounded a bruised and beaten little Jezebel. Danielle had shrunk by about a foot before she’d been able to stop the other witch, so her stomps were clumsy and uneven in her oversized boots. She snatched up her tiny ex-friend and glared at her with a ferocious scowl which would’ve made any normal sized person anxious, let alone a shrunken person in the hands of someone with magic powers. “I guess I’ve changed my mind about going easy on you,” she muttered, and dug her fingernail against Jezebel’s arm. The little woman screamed out in pain, before her arm was suddenly torn off by the giant’s sharp nail. Danielle flipped the woman onto her stomach, and then did the same thing with her other arm, shearing it right off from her shoulder. “There, now I won’t have to worry about you trying to pull any magic shit on me again,” she smirked, turning Jezebel back around. “Actually, you know what this kind of reminds me of?” She picked Jezebel up and carried her out to her backyard while the maimed tiny cried and screamed in her palm. Slipping off her boots, Danielle dropped Jezebel inside one of them, and then disappeared from the tiny’s sight for a few moments, leaving her squandering on the sweaty, hot insole of the leather shoe.

     Suddenly Danielle’s face appeared at the entrance to the boot again, a malicious grin on her face. “I was kinda thinking,” she said, giggling as Jezebel tried to stand up. But it was hard to naturally get off the ground without any arms, and she frequently fell over, flopping about. “Without you having any arms anymore, you kinda remind me of a worm. Which is like, exactly what you used to call people when you put them in your shoes, right? Cuz they were always squirming around and stuff.” Jezebel gasped as she saw Danielle’s hand appear, clutching a fat, 6-inch nightcrawler in her fingers, dropping it into the boot. Suddenly fearful of the wriggling, faceless bug, she tried getting away, as the real, actual worm began inching over her and probing her little body curiously, but without her arms she wasn’t able to crawl very effectively. “God, you look so fucking pathetic right now. Like you’re really living up to the nickname considering how you look trying to move about. But even an actual worm is bigger than you, stupid bitch.” The dimly lit cavern of the boot quickly darkened as Danielle inserted her bare, sweaty, dirt-encrusted sole inside, trapping Jezebel and the worm together beneath the arch of her foot. As Jezebel cried out for mercy, she felt the rancid sole above her suddenly grow bigger as Danielle restored her height, now safe from anyone trying to sabotage her. 

     “Oh, and by the way Jez,” the booming, authoritarian voice declared from high above outside the musty, leathery hell, as Danielle lifted her foot just enough for her to shake the boot about until Jezebel (and the worm) were positioned under the ball of her foot. “I also cast a little bit of durability onto your body as well,” she explained, and stepped back down, squishing the entirety of her old friend’s naked little body against the sweat-stained sole of the boot, while the worm next to her got squashed flat, its guts spreading out beneath the giant girl’s incomparable weight. “So no amount of squashing on my end will ever be able to kill you.” Jezebel screamed out as thousands of tons of weight bored down on her tiny head, but her body was unwilling to succumb to the pressure. Above her, the girl she once considered her best friend laughed out loud over how cruel she could be when she really wanted to, and as millions of pounds of weight begged to crush her body while a mix of worm guts, leather residue, and foot sweat seeped into Jezebel’s throat, Danielle squatted down so she could get nice and close to the boot and whisper a final set of words to the shrunken victim: “I win.”

     For the first time in Danielle’s career as an evil, person-shrinking witch, she had to worry about collateral damage. The vast majority of people she’d shrunk in her life were strangers to her, so whoever might investigate their disappearances would never be able to link it back to her. But Jezebel was different, since they’d known each other for years. So as soon as people realized she went missing, her family would mention Danielle as being one of her good friends, and then the cops would come knocking on her door. She wasn’t really scared of the police, but it’d be an annoying nuisance to have to deal with them. Much easier to just go straight to the source and get rid of Jezebel's family.

     So Danielle pulled up to her parents’ place later that night, stepping out of the car with her signature boots on and looking around the neighborhood to make sure nobody was watching her as she stepped up to the front door and knocked. It swung open a few moments later with a middle aged man at the other end. “Dani! This is a surprise, what brings you around?” he asked. They had no idea how evil she was on the inside, and had never had any reason to think she was anything other than a regular friend of their daughter’s.

     Danielle looked past her friend’s dad into the rest of the house, and saw Jezebel’s mom and older sister sitting at the dinner table. She looked back at the dad of the family, grimacing at his unsuspecting smile. It was so much easier to shrink them down when they were total strangers, but there was still a sliver of humanity present in her soul when an innocent family friends were the ones about to be her next victims. “Sorry Mr. Haddad, it’s nothing personal so I’ll try to make it quick for you guys,” she said, causing a confused expression to don the man’s face. Danielle quickly waved her hand in his direction, and then quickly turned to the other two members of the family and shrunk them down as well. With a sigh, she picked up the family patriarch, who was going through shock as he tried to process what had just happened, and then walked over to to Jezebel’s mom and sister, snatching them up before they could run away. She took a seat at the dinner table and slipped off one of her boots, prepping to give her newest trio of prey the same final moments that she gave everyone else she shrunk. But as she dumped the family members into the opening of the boot, she realized she’d made a mistake.

     “Mom? Dad!?” the strained voice of her old best friend cried out from within the leathery cage.

     “Shit,” Danielle muttered, rubbing her forehead. Her little toy was still alive because of the invulnerability spell she’d cast on her, but she hadn’t moved in so many hours that she forgot which shoe she’d put her in. As a service to her friend’s family, and the small amounts of kindness they’d shown Danielle over the years, she’d meant to just squish them all at once in the shoe that didn’t have their maimed daughter in it. But clearly that plan had failed now. So the best course of action would be to just get it over with. 

     Danielle pointed her pale, grimy toes at the entrance to the boot and slipped them into their familiar home. Even though she liked the rest of Jezebel’s family, she couldn’t help but wiggle her toes in anticipation as she felt the four bodies squirming their way. Maybe… just a little bit of indulgence, she thought to herself as her heart started to race, and held back from squishing them right away like she had been planning. For some reason, the idea of her newest tinies being familiar instead of strangers was turning her on more than she usually felt. She couldn’t hear the anguished screams from inside her boot, as Jezebel realized that her ex bestie had just shrunken her innocent family, and her innocent family had discovered their youngest daughter had been living in a dirty, sweaty shoe. Worst of all was Jezebel’s dad, who’d had a heart attack after seeing his daughter with her arms cut off, squirming around on the moist floor, stained in the sweat and dirt of Danielle’s massive, unwashed foot. Jezebel’s sister had had an asthma attack from how thick the murky air was, but all that her desperate gasps did was fill her lungs with the hot, rancid stench of Danielle’s toejam. And Jezebel’s mother was made victim to Danielle’s toes, her body roughly toyed with between the domineering appendages that scraped her shrunken clothes off her body and jammed her face against the pad of her big toe, forcing bits of flaky dried skin and micro-droplets of sweat into her screaming throat.

     But eventually Danielle decided to end it, and raised her foot up, the boot lifting several feet into the air as she got ready to end their lives. The family of four all watched as the evil girl’s bare foot elevated just far enough off of her boot’s insole to give everyone a glimpse at the vast field of dirt-speckled skin, and Jezebel screamed out as she realized what was about to happen to the other members of her family. But Danielle couldn’t hear her—not that it would’ve changed what she was about to do anyways—and slammed her boot down onto the floor with so much force that it actually hurt her foot a little bit. With her captor’s invincibility spell keeping her from dying, Jezebel could only watch through tears as Danielle’s dirty foot suddenly slammed down, completely eviscerating her parents and sister as their bodies exploded in all directions in a mess of blood and guts. “Sorry you had to see that Jez,” Danielle said from above, turning to head back out of the house. “Just consider it like a punishment for your stubbornness earlier today. I’m sure you thought I would’ve just squashed you by now like I do with most of my slaves, but I’m gonna be keeping you around for a loooong time. So unless you want me to think of another way to get back at you, you better get to it!” And so, covered in the blood of her parents, the little worm obeyed her master, and stuck her tongue out to begin licking away at the unending surface of Danielle’s sweaty foot, knowing that her only hope for freedom would be if unwavering servitude might one day convince her goddess to put her out of her misery.