“Well, boys. I’m off to school. Those easy A’s won’t make themselves, after all,” Nicole smarmed from the doorframe. She twirled a finger through the goldenrod locks of her blonde crown, while the opposite hand swung a keyring in jangling loops about her index digit, round and round. Her grin sifted from one corner of her lips to the other, as her cheeks occasionally puffed from casually chewing her bubblegum. Her opal-blue eyes sparkled with amusement. “Brandon? Aren’t you going to say good-bye to me, big brother?”

            Brandon rolled his eyes, taking his time to turn his head in his sister’s direction from where he lay on the couch, just to ensure it thoroughly annoyed her. Blinking, he stared with blank disinterest at his glamorously dolled-up nineteen-year-old sibling: the queen bee of her every social circle, but under this roof, he made it his personal mission to never give her the satisfaction of thinking she was as important as everyone else made her feel. She, in turn, liked to serve up lots of passive-aggressive honey at every possible occasion.

            “Uh-huh, sure. I’m definitely not in the middle of something over here,” Brandon muttered sarcastically.

            “Rotting into the couch and staring at the TV for five straight hours? Yeah, yeah, I guess you are busy,” Nicole snapped. Her gaze shifted over to Jason, her brother’s best friend, where he too was sprawled across the cushions; though, as soon as she’d entered the room, the young man had made a noticeable effort to prop himself up in a more respectable pose upon the pillows, and with a posture that helped accentuate his biceps. The alluring blonde smiled, popping her gum loudly in her cheeks.

            “What about you, Jason? Care to be a little nicer than my couch potato brother over here?” Nicole teased. She winked with great aplomb, more than enough to make Jason blush and Brandon grit his teeth in annoyance.

            “You better get going,” Brandon said, “Or those easy A’s will go away, and then who knows which professors you may or may not have to blow to get the numbers back up.”

            “Hey, c’mon, man,” Jason grumbled. He looked back to Nicole with a winning smile and clenched his arms; his heart thumped in his chest with its usual racing pulse, an effect which had trolled him for the previous eight years or so of his adolescence in the presence of his secret crush. “Sorry about that, Nicole. He’s just pissed cuz of how the last play-off went. Have a good time in class!”

            “Aw. That’s so sweet of you, Jason. I guess between the two of you, one of you had to be the non-jerk,” Nicole swooned. “Or should I say, one of you had to be the really cool guy who actually knows how to talk to women?” She couldn’t have given two craps about Jason, of course, or his obvious feelings for her, but it was more than worth it watching the silent agony of her brother on the couch as she casually flirted with his friend. Just for good measure, she gave her ass a little push outward, until it was on the verge of testing her cut-off jean seams. The juicy mounds of her cheeks arched, and she felt Jason’s hungry gaze on her, fighting not to be too evident. Idly her hand crested down her lower back and over her rump, righting itself again at her voluptuous thigh. She pouted, then made her way for the side door exited and stepped out onto the porch, leaving the boys in front of the still-flickering TV in awkward silence.

            “Why’ve you gotta do that, man?” Brandon said, flicking the channel on the screen.

            “What?”
            “You know what. Getting a hard-on for my sister while I’m in the room.”

            “Oh, c’mon, man, shut the hell up,” Jason laughed. “All I’m doing is being nice.”

            “What you’re doing is trying to get in her pants, under this roof, where I live.”

            “Awfully concerned about who your sister gets with, aren’t ya?”

            “All right, one more remark like that, and this remote is flying right at your face,” Brandon warned.

            Jason shifted in his seat, relaxing again now that the attractive young woman was out of the room, and let his gaze wander to the ceiling.

            “Where does Nicole sleep?” Jason wondered aloud, starkly confused to notice he’d never actually acquired this information.

            “Oh, for god’s sake. Why not just ask where her panty drawer is in the house?”

            “Seriously. There’s only, like, three rooms upstairs, and none of them are hers.”

            “Yeah, yeah. She sleeps in the attic.”

            “The attic? What, did she draw the short straw?”

            Brandon shrugged. “She likes it up there. She says she gets more room and more privacy. Hey, anything that keeps her out of the way more often. Plus, if she ever embarrasses me on campus, I have the ultimate revenge to let everyone know she sleeps in the roof. I’ve never been in it, though; she locks the door.”

            “Huh. So… better for you, then, if you had a picture of it to show someone, if you had to?” Jason encouraged.

            “Good try. You just want to see her room so you can jerk off into her bras or something.”

            “Hey, even if I want to see it, is it bad for you if you can get a picture of her dumpy attic room, in case you need to prank her?”

            Beyond bored with the TV, Brandon looked from his friend to the screen and grimaced. What else was there to do on a day with no class, work, or anything interesting on ESPN? He threw the remote aside.

            “All right, just a quick look. And we’ll have to pick the lock, obviously.”

            Trying not to let his excitement show, Jason hustled after his friend as they made their way upstairs, then the secondary landing at the end of the hall, where the door to Nicole’s room waited.

            “Give me a second,” Brandon muttered. He twiddled a paper clip between his thumbs and stuck it in the opening, fiddling with the lock for a few minutes. Just when Jason was about to suggest they give up for the time being and look for an actual key, the mechanism snapped and the door swung open.

            Brandon and Jason stealthily made their way up the stairs into Nicole’s attic bedroom, despite there being no one else on the premises to catch them. The wooden slats creaked under their shoes as they emerged in the wide-open pyramid span of Nicole’s attic lair.

            For a full minute, the boys paused in staid quietude. Their hands hung at their sides, their jaws tipped open. Neither had the capacity to blink nor intake breath as they gazed in perturbed confusion at the array which awaited them in Brandon’s sister’s bedroom. There was, indeed, a bed, a dresser, and a desk in one corner, but this only accounted for a quarter of the space.

            The rest of the room’s floor area, and several of its raised surfaces as well, were occupied by one-foot-by-one-foot pads of varied greenery and silver-speckled microcosms, like macro scale models of computer chips. There were more than a dozen of these patches, laid out in the manner of a garden across the wooden floor. Each box was walled in by a roughly three-inch-high barrier.

            Gathering their composure enough to move again, Brandon and Jason ventured forward into the room. The latter led the way, intensely curious as to the bizarre setting they found themselves in, while the former hung back, having long ago forgotten to pull out his camera phone.

            “Holy shit,” Jason uttered as he stooped over one of the boxes. “I think… I think this is supposed to be…”

            The last words couldn’t escape Jason’s lips, which was just as well, because Brandon had puzzled out the identities of these objects within a few seconds of entering the room, implausible though it seemed.

            They were tiny cities. Each box a self-contained urban metropolis, with skyscrapers one-inch high, and a bustling life below: and assuredly, there was indeed life, as insect-like vehicles zipped through the streets and mite-resembling throngs of creatures filled in the spaces between.

            The young man gawked at the impossible madness of his sister’s possessions, unsure whether to disregard this all as a strange dream, or actually allow himself the realization that he was currently standing over the distillation of his innermost fetishes and desires: the very concept of tiny civilizations, owned by a giant woman as subjects to a goddess. It was just unfortunate they happened to be owned by his annoying brat of a little sister, because otherwise, the sight alone would’ve given Brandon ammo for a lifetime’s worth of masturbation. Never in his life had he felt more conflicted than he did in this precise moment.

“Brandon? Brandon, are you with me, man?” Jason sputtered. He lightly punched his friend in the shoulder, then ushered him to hunch over the nearest city. “This is crazy. Like, you’re seeing this, right? I’m not high or anything?”

            “You’re not high,” Brandon confirmed. “It’s, um…”

            “It’s fucking tiny-ass cities! Like, a ton of them. Super-detailed, too. Unbelievable, man. There’s things living in here! What, does Nicole keep a bunch of ant farms or something?”

            “I don’t…” Brandon gulped, backing away. “I don’t think those are ants.”

            So caught up were the pair of them in their shocked reverie, neither heard the sound of the door opening again, nor the clacking of footsteps back up the stairs, nor indeed the cowgirl-esque quick draw of a hand into a purse, a hand around a revolver, and the cocking of said firearm in the direction of both Jason and Brandon.

            Brandon only just had time to turn around and find himself staring into the self-serious, grinning countenance of his younger sibling, with her weapon pointed directly at him, before there was a flash of blinding blue, and then everything went dark.

            Light streamed into Brandon’s dilating pupils. He winced, curling into himself, and emitted an animal groan. Blinking, he noticed the equally prone form of his friend Jason beside him.

            “Holy shit, dude,” Jason mumbled, rubbing his eyes. “What… what hap…”

            “I don’t know,” Brandon said.

            “My head, man. Jesus. Did we make jaeger bombs last night?”

            “No.”

            “Then what… what in the hell… where even are we? This isn’t the basement of Scotty’s, is it?” Jason sat up with his arms wrapped over his gut. “I don’t remember anything. That wasn’t even a brownout, that was a blackout.”

            Brandon looked around the mostly gray expanse of the cluttered room. He and Jason were laid atop a cushioned rug in the corner, surrounded by a few disheveled sofas and tables, but little else. It didn’t resemble anyone’s apartment he recalled. He might’ve become instantly frightened, if there was any sign that they were being held prisoner. Patting his pockets, he realized his cell phone and his wallet were still within. Whoever put them here wasn’t after their belongings, and it appeared the door to the room was wide open. Yet even so, a ghostly feeling of subconscious dread prodded at the back of his mind, though he couldn’t remember why.

            So what the hell, indeed?

            “Did… didn’t we go up to your sister’s room?” Jason muttered. “To check it out.”

            “I think so, yeah.”

            “That’s all I can think of. Your sister’s room, in the attic,” Jason said. “God, I hope she… didn’t catch us.”

            “Yeah, that’d be real bad for you,” Brandon grunted with a roll of his eyes. “No chance to get in her pants if she catches you peeping on her shit.”

            “Hey, lay off it, man. She’s really cool, and you might notice it if you weren’t such a jerk to her all the time.”

            Brandon pressed a hand over his eyes. It was way too early for this conversation, and his head was far too sore even if it was later. He too crawled onto his haunches and, giving Jason a hand, they righted themselves. Just to ensure he wasn’t still in a half-drunk dream, Brandon placed a hand on one of the disarrayed couches for support. It felt real enough. Maybe he was just being foolish, letting paranoia creep into his perception.

            That was when a soldier appeared in the doorway. Dressed in camo fatigues and combat boots, with a semi-automatic weapon strapped across his back and a staid grimace on his face, he blocked the entry. Brandon and Jason nearly tumbled straight over. God, if they were in trouble with the law now, their parents would never let him hear the end of it. Nor would Nicole.

            “Good, you’re awake,” the soldier said rigidly. He appeared self-serious, though at least not furious with the boys. “Follow me.”

            “F-Follow you?” Jason blurted. “Excuse me, sir, we’re a little confused. We don’t remember w-”

            “There’s no time to play twenty questions right now,” the man interrupted. “We’re hours behind schedule. If we don’t have every hand on deck, then the little peace we’ve had recently will be taken. Follow me, now.”

            The man didn’t reach for his primary weapon, but his hand hovered over the sidearm at his hip. With a nudge from Brandon, the beleaguered pair got moving and filed after the soldier, who turned and led them down the hall.

            “What are we doing?” Jason whispered

            “You really want to question the pissy dude who has a gun?” Brandon whispered. “Just play it cool a few minutes. I don’t think he wants to hurt us.”

            “Famous last words,” Jason said.

            As they walked behind the trooper, Brandon coolly fished his cell phone out of his pocket and checked the signal. Zero bars. Of course. He tried to put through a text, just in case, but found it bounced back. Defeated for now, he deposited the device back in his pocket, if another chance arose shortly with better access to the signal.

            The pair were led down three flights of stairs after their stern host, who occasionally looked over his shoulder to ensure they still followed. He pushed open a door in the ratty lobby of what they now assumed to be a mostly abandoned hotel building. In the concrete street, where they stood on the sidewalk, Jason and Brandon were greeted by the sight of a fairly ordinary major urban thoroughfare. Apartment complexes, ordinary houses, businesses, even a firehouse were tightly packed along the block. Over the tops, they spied the needles of skyscrapers in the distance. A checkered old-fashioned diner dotted the corner of the block. Of course, there wasn’t a soul in sight save for the two of them and the mystery soldier. Like how those cheesy zombie apocalypse movies often began.

            The glow of sunlight bloomed around them in the street, or at least Brandon thought at first; the light wasn’t nearly as bright as when he was usually outdoors. It must have been an incredibly overcast day, judging by the look of the sky. All he could see when he craned his neck up was a sea of crested white, probably pre-storm clouds, though they didn’t appear to move. Awfully strange. Out of instinct, he was reminded of laying on his bed and staring up at the ceiling, but he quickly adjusted his thinking to more realistic expectations.

            “Let’s get moving, you two,” the soldier barked when he noticed them dawdling.

            So they did. And as they turned two more corners and walked through the mostly ghost-town alleys, Brandon arrived at a conclusion he’d suspected ever since they stepped outside the building.

            This was not their town. He’d lived there for nearly all his life and spend his adolescence trolling through the streets with his friends, looking for trouble. He’d recognize this patch of wide-open streets if they actually resided in his city. Within a quarter mile of silent strolling behind the soldier, the situation had gone from awfully strange to decidedly nerve-wracking. Where were they?

            “Please, man. Just give us a clue,” Jason whined, obviously reaching a similar realization as his friend. “What is this place?”

            “No idle talk until we complete the job,” the soldier snapped. “Maybe you don’t understand the gravity of the circumstances, but I do, and it’s my role to keep this town protected.”

            Before either Jason or Brandon could ask what that meant or if the soldier was high off his ass, they turned another corner and came to face the pitifully crumpled remains of a six-story brick building the length of a city block. It was a uniquely humbling sight. The structure hadn’t merely been demolished, but obliterated, skyward-down. Neither of its neighboring apartment complexes appeared to have been affected; this single, massive, and potentially destructive block of mortar and concrete had been reduced down to a pile of ash and grit by what Brandon could only have guessed was a perfectly-sized meteor crashing directly down on this building and this building alone. Yet, of course, there was no giant smoldering space-rock lying in the rubble.

            Around the structure and on the next wide-berthed block, they abruptly got the first sight of other humans milling about, most of them walking in the same direction. Suddenly there was life where before the streets had been emptied, plague-style. Cars were either parked or just outright abandoned with the doors open throughout the packed street. At the back of the traffic jam, more cars arrived and their owners simply emerged from the vehicles and joined the march in the same direction. This sight of other life was at least comforting, since it suggested the soldier might not turn out to be some crazy who was murdering everyone he could fool into following him.

            “Jesus,” Jason said, looking out over the crowd.

“This way,” the soldier snapped. He joined the nearest cluster of flowing people. “We’re almost there. Cut the chatter and prepare to be put on the line for work.”

            Put on the line? This whole unfolding scenario was growing more perplexing and likely dangerous by the second. Brandon began to shoot Jason meaningful glances, hoping to silently plot out a possible escape plan, should one become necessary. For all they knew, it was already necessary. His heart thumped wildly in his chest.

            “Hey, man,” Brandon whispered to a stranger walking beside him. “What’s going on? That dude in the camo won’t give it up.”

            “Shh…” the unknown man hushed without looking in Brandon’s direction. His face was tight and taut, with dark sleepless rings beneath his eyes. Shivering, Brandon abandoned that conversation and looked around him for other possibilities. Men and women moved with the same robotic determination, all of them as stoic and tired looking as the first guy. He resolved not to try for another chitchat until he got another hint of their whereabouts.

            The large herd of moving people, occasionally jostling but mostly marching as a single unit as though they were prisoners on their way to labor camp, led Brandon and Jason toward a point which they judged to be a town center, or at least a major focal point of the metropolis. The streets curved into a stadium-sized roundabout surrounding a grassy locale. In the center of it all was a staged concrete slab holding up a towering statue, probably double the size of the Statue of Liberty, if not taller than that. Certainly she was more massive than any of the immediately surrounding buildings.

            Rather than depicting a crowned woman carrying a torch and book representing the freedom of a nation, though, they were instead gazing up at the gold-plated majesty of a girl with a cheeky smile and her hands planted on her slender hips. In the face of all this madness, Brandon didn’t even have the peace of mind to get sexually distracted by the three-hundred-foot statue of a gorgeous giant woman.

            Wait. Wasn’t he thinking about something like that just before the blackout? Something about a giant woman or a tiny city? Maybe he was just remembering his previous fetishistic internet search. There was far more at stake here than his horniness.

            Brandon tried to slow his breathing, unable to process almost any of what they were seeing now. The crowds were all converging on this single point in the streets, and not just from the direction they’d come. Every opening in the concrete jungle of brick and glass gave way to flowing, militantly focused humans. Men and women, young and old, of varying sizes and ethnicities. There had to be thousands packed into the open space here alone. Looking up, Brandon could spot dozens of comparatively miniscule workers hanging from pulleys looped over the statue, hammering and chiseling away at the beautiful visage of the honored young woman, whoever she was; at the base around her metallic feet, throngs worked, some laying stone, some polishing the gold, and some working away with tools.

            Squinting, Brandon wondered if he recognized that self-assured, feminine face on the golden idol, but was quickly shoved from behind by the oncoming crowd before he could pause long enough to decipher her features. It took careful stepping now to avoid tripping, as only now that he physically stood in the center, did Brandon realize the ground was littered with debris made of shattered rock and wood; it almost resembled a battlefield. The flow of the crowd slowed, everyone lining up with surprisingly professional order, until neat rows and columns of humans were formed around the altar of the enormous statue.

            “We’re here,” the soldier said into the ears of Brandon and Jason. Already around them, civilians had begun stooping down and scooping up the scattered building remains. “You’re new, so until we can trust you’ll get the job done, you’ll be on stone duty. Pick up what’s around you. When a stone comes your way, accept it and pass it forward. Quickly.”

            “Wait. Wait, wait, hold up, man,” Jason stammered, ever the public speaker. “We didn’t sign up for this. I don’t know who you think we are or what, but we’re not supposed to be here.”

            “Get to work,” the soldier repeated. “There will not be a third warning.”

            “Please,” Brandon hissed to the uniformed man. “Just tell us what’s going on. We have to try to figure out how to get back to where we-”

            “What’s going on here? Why aren’t they lifting?” another soldier demanded, passing through the neatly organized lines of working humanity. Unlike the original trooper, he gripped his semi-automatic in his arms, which instantly put Jason and Brandon on edge. “Get to work, you two.”

            “I’ve explained their duty, but they remain resistant,” the first soldier said.

            “Well, how about that?” the second said with a sly smile. Before either boy could respond, he jammed the butt of his rifle straight into Jason’s back. Squealing like a child, the twenty-one-year-old staggered to the ground, narrowly avoiding smacking his face on a large chunk of stone. Instead, the butt of the rifle came down on his back again. Brandon couldn’t even think to try defending his friend before he, too, was rendered stunned on the grass as the first soldier whacked him in the knees. A boot came down hard on his spine.

            “All right, all right! STOP!” Brandon shouted. He could feel a welt on his back forming from the soldier’s boot. “We’ll work, we’ll work.”

            “See that you do,” the more aggressive of the two troopers sneered. Both soldiers halted their assault. He withdrew his rifle and spit on the ground. “You’ll not jeopardize every person here through your inaction. Now get up, cowards.”

            Pitifully, the boys helped each other back to their feet as the second soldier wandered off to inspect other workers. The first trooper who’d led them all the way here stayed long enough ensure the pair obeyed. True to their word, the two stooped and heaved up a large chunk of stone apiece and passed it off to the waiting individual next in line. Only then did their apparent captor march away and leave them alone with their fellow “employees.”

            Half an hour passed. Already the two were soaked with sweat, red in the face. The pace was difficult to keep up.

            Looking around in between stone duty, Brandon realized he and Jason weren’t alone in their inadequacy as stone-layers. Across the crowd, he could make out other soldiers in camo, occasionally halting to bark at an individual moving too slowly with the stone conveyor belt system. Some even delivered the brunt of their rifle stock into the citizens’ hips; the citizens only panicked and worked harder, never even looking at the soldiers.

            “Holy fuck, dude,” Jason stuttered at Brandon. “We have to get the hell out of here.”

            “Do you see a way right now?” Brandon scowled, thinking fast and coming up dry. “There’s too many people to get away, too many of those guys with guns. Just go with it for now, okay. They can’t make us do this all day.”

            “Silence,” one of the exhausted female strangers beside Brandon hissed. Despite having a slighter build than either Brandon or Jason, this woman was moving twice as fast, her stringy biceps pulsing with every repetition of heaving the rocks. “Do not endanger the rest of us.”

            Almost angered enough to respond, Brandon instead kept his mouth shut and concentrated on grabbing the next back-breaking rock. Kooky as the citizens around here acted, it was obvious now to him that whatever regime was controlling them, they had some good reasons to be afraid. They appeared to be victims just as well as he and Jason.

            An ear-piercing alarm sounded from some unclear point around them. Brandon cocked his head, attempting to pinpoint the shrill artificial screech, until he realized it was coming from all around: most of the buildings surrounding the town square were marked with spinning red lights to accompany the resonant call. Had someone escaped? Were they finished? Or perhaps the real United States military was rolling in to liberate them all from the insane power trip of whoever was in charge? Maybe it had something to do with that girl carved into the gold statue; it could be she was related to whatever over-compensating creep was calling the shots with these overzealous soldiers. Brandon couldn’t help but smile at the thought of getting his hands on whoever it was that had effectively enslaved him and his friend here.

Collective gasps and even a few screams echoed across the crowd at the sound of the sirens, followed by an instant, deadening hush. The sound chilled Brandon’s bones far more than the bruising sensation of receiving a beat-down by a soldier. Out of the corner of his eye, what appeared curiously like a shadow drifted over the overcast cloud-cover sky. A storm?

            As if through mind control, the entirety of the crowd of thousands knelt to their haunches. On their knees in the grass, no matter where they stood in relation to the statue, hands were clasped together and thrust over their heads. Even, it seemed, the previously gung-ho soldiers broke into what appeared to be genuflection and prayer. Brandon and Jason felt suddenly naked, as they were evidently the last standing people amongst the immense volume of bodies.

            With everyone’s chins bowed toward the ground and hands pointed to heaven, a muffled whisper rose in odd tongues from every single person present. It was impossible to focus for long enough on any one person’s prayer, but Brandon could’ve sworn he heard the word “goddess” come out multiple times with utmost deference. The sirens had stopped, but the rhythmic chanting of the words under their breaths was almost louder.

            “What’s going on?” Jason whispered to Brandon, genuinely afraid for the dozenth time today. He trembled.

            “I don’t know.”

            “What do we do?”

            “Get down,” Brandon said, not eager to test the troopers again. “Just go with it. Don’t get singled out.” In demonstration, Brandon dropped to his knees and tried to copy the movements of his nearest stranger; Jason followed suit. Now every person gathered to the altar of their statue girl was on their knees, mumbling praises too muffled to make out.

            The cold shadow first seen on the cloud cover had now drifted to the town square. Buildings were bathed in a twilight darkness. The shine of the gold statue glimmered despite the growing shroud, but the bodies around them were almost rendered invisible beneath the chilling blackness. He couldn’t say for certain, and it seemed unlikely, but the ground beneath Brandon’s knees seemed to vibrate, inflicting tremors in his body straight to the marrow. Though he’d kept his head bowed like the others, sheer necessity for comprehension of this craziness won over. The young man lifted his chin toward the sky, or at least what he’d previously estimated to be the sky, and found he wasn’t staring up at the clouds any longer. It took a full five seconds for the visage to register in his mind.

            It was Nicole.

            His sister.

            Pouty-smiling, sunny-haired, sculpted-midriff Nicole in a cropped, breast-hugging shirt and scant denim short-shorts which bore her glorious sun-kissed thighs over the hapless metropolis which likely sat lower than her ankles.

            At least, Brandon was pretty sure it was Nicole. It was tough to tell, considering he’d never in his life seen his sister standing over an entire cityscape in a body the size of a significant national landmass. He doubted anyone ever had, for that matter. The titanic perky nineteen-year-old’s gorgeously toned legs stretched so high up that he nearly sprung a crick in his neck just from trying to drink in the sight of his bratty “little” sister all in one go.

            Brandon’s gaze darted back to the golden statue, which, despite how puny it made he and his fellow workers look, was an absolute rodent compared to the actual Nicole. He looked from the idol then back to his giga-scale sister, then once more, and suddenly the catastrophic truth clicked, despite making no discernable sense whatsoever. The memory of his final moments before the blackout came creeping back from his buried subconscious: the locked door, the miniature cities, the bustling micro-bodies within, the thundering of Nicole’s feet up the stairs, and at last the flash of light.

            It couldn’t be.

            He was so not having his deepest, darkest fantasy fulfilled by a combination of vile serendipity, misshapen laws of physics, and his very own baby sister with her snide laugh and earth-sized ego. Reality was not so cruel.

            And yet it was. Almost as cruel as the near-instantaneous erection he had growing in his pants now; sickening as it was, the factors unique to his tastes at play here were almost too much to bear, and Nicole, no matter how much Brandon hated and repressed it, was a beautiful young woman.

            Even worse, she made a beautiful young goddess as well.

            Because, assuredly, that was what she was to these dedicated citizens. Brandon, and even Jason, understood that now. Not a dictator, not a warlord, but self-centered, conquest-claiming, girly-girly Nicole and her majestic, celestial body. Testosterone rocked his helpless body.

            Just to confirm it wasn’t an illusion, the multiple-mile-high girl swung her hourglass hips from side to side and twirled her finger through her gleaming locks in that telltale way which indicated she was about to get something she wanted. Her opal-blue eyes widened with tangible glee. She giggled, and the sound of her laughter boomed and reverberated like a cannon crash through the streets. It was louder than either the sirens or the praises combined.

            The chanting and prayer of the crowds swelled to its loudest point. Though all in whisper, the combined strength of the thousands of voices around Brandon and Jason was rising ever higher; their bodies worked double time to bow and gyrate, even with their noses pressed to the earth, in reverence to their blonde bombshell of a ruler.

            And from the look on her sky-sized face, Nicole was savoring every last one of them and their soul-baring acts with unparalleled joy.

            “Well, hello again, everyone. It’s me, your favorite goddess, come to see how work is coming on your latest little project for me,” she boomed with all the gusto of an infomercial girl, plus the gleaming white teeth to match. Nicole’s omnipresent voice seemed to permeate every surface of the city, rattling bones and the artificial earth alike. Light glinted off her broad palm as the sky-high spires of her fingers waggled in hypnotizing tandem. “I’m sure you all missed me very, very much.”

            The prayer and chant-singing from the workers surrounding Brandon and Jason rose to yet higher volumes. It took all Brandon’s effort not to throw his hands over his ears to protect them, but frankly, so many of his senses were overloaded with shock and near-fainting conflict, it wouldn’t have made much difference. And despite their maddening surroundings, Brandon was just pleased to have an excuse to cower on his knees and help conceal the shameful hard-on in his jeans. But then again, judging by the screeching vigor from some of his compatriots, he doubted he was alone in this sexual sentiment.

            He was just the only one who could call the miles-tall goddess a sister as well.

            “Now everyone hold tight. I’m going to get a better look at you and your cute little handiwork,” Nicole declared. Her hand, still hovering over the city like a flying saucer, shifted to a point beyond Brandon’s sight, multiple streets away. Both of her arms spread wide, almost in an embrace, as she gripped the exterior city walls on opposite ends.

            All around, the workers flattened themselves onto their stomachs, arms and legs spread wide. It was a singularly bizarre visage, with thousands of civilians in neat lines obediently prostrating themselves. Such a sight might’ve commanded the boys’ attentions longer, if it wasn’t for the far more macabre subject of Nicole and her half-mile-long arms, creamy-pale and toned by yoga, barely flexing with the effort to support the weight of the pitifully puny city.

            “She’s picking us up,” Brandon hissed to Jason. His friend, nodding in the direction of their sea of fellow workers, copied again, and perhaps just in time. No sooner had the pair laid themselves in the grass like the rest when the entire city began to rumble.

            While Nicole’s voice was powerful enough to make every surface hum, the seismic reality of actually being lifted thousands of feet into the air with almost no warning left a far more destructive impression, at least on Brandon’s stomach. He was just shocked no buildings came toppling down. Certainly they quaked hard enough, or maybe that was just his cranium vibrating.

            “No shit she is!” Jason choked.

Craning his neck to the side, Brandon observed the sky of his sister: her torso growing larger by the instant as she lifted them, sweeping past the taut plain of her midriff, up toward the pert mountains of her breasts bulging beneath the shirt. At the center of the heavens, though, was Nicole’s triumphantly grinning face, framed by her angel-yellow hair in a long halo. Every laugh line, every pore, and every shadow of her dimples was on display upon the radiant terrain of her sun-like expression.

            Despite being separated by the equivalent of a couple skyscrapers’ worth from her countenance, Brandon never dreamed he’d see his sister’s face this close up in his life. The experience made him a little ill, and not just because he was small enough to be accidentally inhaled like a dust speck if her nose came any lower down into the city.

            The simulated earthquake resumed as Nicole set off at a cheerful jaunt across her attic bedroom. Just a steady walk. Despite existing actual miles away, the thunderous pounding of the young woman’s footsteps was felt all the way up in the city, via the repetitive trajectory of the diorama metropolis rising and falling with Nicole’s gait. Muscles tensed visibly beneath the soft skin of her forearms.

            Brandon’s jaw met the grass again as the city collectively shuddered. For a second, he assumed his sister had carelessly let go of the place, allowing the entire mini kingdom and its many inhabitants to plummet toward a shattering demise. However, upon observing that he wasn’t falling through open air, he discovered the giantess had merely put them down. With courage, he rolled back over and found that Nicole’s expansive torso remained the entirety of their skyline. She must have set them higher up than the floor. Upon her desk.

            “Let’s just get nice and comfortable here, why don’t we?” Nicole decreed. “Don’t let me interrupt you. Go back to complimenting your goddess.” She combed through her golden locks with luxuriously curled fingers, then patted down her shirt above her lean stomach, arching her back at just the right angle to simultaneously stick out her mini-bubble butt and proudly display her modest tits.

            It was a move Brandon had eye-rollingly witnessed her utilize countless times through their lives, generally in order to get the nearest flock of men (including Jason) to drool and offer her whatever she wanted. But now, when her body occupied roughly the same surface area of a billion-dollar private island, this sultry move took on a whole new significance. She wasn’t flirting right now. She was making herself a living idol for thousands of helpless worshippers.

            And damn it if it wasn’t effective. She had the attention of everyone in the palm of her hand; she’d have them wrapped around her finger, too, if their microbial bodies were even long enough to reach. Brandon and Jason, along with the rest of their strange peers, crawled back to their haunches. Everyone else around them then went directly back into the previously scheduled genuflection and songs of praise. The boys, still dumbstruck and no closer to settling into this new reality, remained on their knees, necks craned to the skyscape of feminine curves.

            Apparently satisfied with the effect of her struck pose, Nicole turned around. For an instant, the twin lunar hills of her ass, tightly packaged in the denim Daisy Dukes, revolved above the city. Just for good measure, Nicole tightened and flexed her glutes, causing the bulbous planetary mounds to tease a twerk. Before the show became too gratuitous, though, she finished her revolution and planted her rump upon the desk to the immediate left of the city walls. There was a thunderclap as her ass hit the wood, followed by a lilting giggle as Nicole observed another tremble in the urban architecture, and then everything was still again.

            “No way…” Jason uttered.

            With delicacy which didn’t seem possible in a being as tremendous as Nicole, the towering bombshell crossed her right leg over her left knee. In jeans as scant as hers, this simple act put on a rather dramatic and decidedly mouthwatering show, as the beautifully curved wall of her sun-glazed thigh seemed to stretch into infinity above the city. Her leg arched so high to cross its opposite that Nicole’s inviting ass cheek was beginning to peek out the tattered corner of the cut-offs. Her monumental hand came to rest somewhere adjacent to the other city wall, her mighty digits drumming loudly.

            Up above, the girl’s smile curved ever giddier. Even still as a statue, without a finger laid upon the city, she had them in her thrall. By the mere positioning of her arm above the city, and her thigh exposed purely for the pleasure and sung compliments of her little subjects, Nicole could own an entire population. Plus, that winning smile of hers didn’t hurt, either. Even Brandon was struggling not to become sickeningly enchanted.

            “What are we going to do?” Jason mumbled at his friend, his voice half-drunken, and only slightly tinged by worry.

            “We couldn’t get away before she showed up. You think it’ll be easier now?” Brandon said. He swatted at his crotch, hoping to calm down his insistent erection. “We just have to keep waiting.”

            “But maybe if she sees us, she’ll realize it’s us, and she can… I don’t know, get us out, or…”

            “She did this to us on purpose, you idiot.”

            “Wait… you mean…” Jason’s tone faded into dreamland.

            “You’re kidding, aren’t you?” Brandon said, bowing his head in frustration. His eyes darted between the workers, all identically mouthing the obviously-practiced prayers and songs. “I guess you’re seeing the real Nicole now, huh?”

            When he was honest with himself, Brandon realized, so was he as well.

            “So you mean she w-wanted us in here,” Jason stammered. The fright had melted from his voice, and now he was only curious. In fact, he seemed to be flattered by this realization.

            Brandon had to turn away from Jason in his irritation, to avoid shouting at him for his inability to keep up. Not that he necessarily blamed his friend for being slow, given the insane series of existential shocks they’d been delivered recently. But between the creepy Nicole-loving regime and his own psycho-sexual confusion over his godlike sister, this was not a peaceful juncture for Brandon.

            Spit-glossed clicking rumbled from on high like a gathering thunderstorm. It even managed to quiet most of the worshippers down to a low whisper. Looking back up, Brandon realized his sister was tsking her tongue against her palate like a mother to a naughty child. She simpered with a falsely piteous glint in her eye, shaking her head from side to side. Golden locks whipped about, rippling the uneven light of the attic bulbs behind her. A gentle exhale wracked her titanic body, and with it came an innocuous flexing of the exposed, meaty cliffside that was her quadricep.

            “Oh, no, no, no. This won’t do at all, will it?” Nicole scolded amiably. Her brow furrowed cutely. Those opal-blue eyes widened, seething. “This is all you’ve managed to come up with? It doesn’t even look HALF done!”

            The hand which had taken up a subtly possessive perch beyond the city walls rose back into view. The winding spires of the young woman’s fingers made for an impressive fireworks display of flesh and muscle as she greedily reached down into the urban habitat.

            Brandon looked to the partially constructed statue of his sibling. It was impressive, really, for something created by dust-people. The workers previously dangling from the structure scrambled toward the ground; some zip-lined for earth, and those closer just flung themselves to the ground, almost certainly breaking an ankle in the process. Instants after the statue was cleared of the relentless workers, a pair of fingers befitting a cosmic deity loomed into view and swallowed it up.

            Her thumb and forefinger.

            The pads of Nicole’s elegant fingers latched around the entirety of her worshippers’ work, and for the first time, Brandon had a direct point of reference to truly understand how utterly massive his sister was.

            He wasn’t sure whether he was ready to vomit or get blue balls. All of her digits easily dwarfed the incredible structure.

            Testing the mettle of the statue, Nicole rubbed her fingertips up and down the auric shaft of the statue as easily as she might have toyed with a coin. Metal creaked and groaned in her grasp, slowly squeezing closer together, trapped in the car compactor of the blonde’s svelte fingers. She was crushing it. Workers scurried away from ground zero of Nicole’s fingers, forming into a crowd surging toward the edge of the park for safety, which Brandon and Jason were only too happy to join.

The recognizable features of the statue were turning to mush between Nicole’s fingers, bowing to the unending strength of its inspiration. Giant spiraled fingerprints came away on the metal. Every colorful imperfection of her perfect skin alternately glowed pink and white as blood pumped beneath her gridded flesh in small measures, so casually providing the necessary power to ruin the hard work of thousands of people.

            “With all I do for you…” Nicole sighed. Her index finger withdrew, easing the statue against her thumb, and then descended with wind-lashing speed. The girl’s fingertip flicked into the golden idol and launched it like a missile over the heads of the citizens, whereupon it hurtled through three full buildings across the street before it came to rest amongst the smoky rubble. “…this is the thanks I get?”

            Brandon and Jason cowered in the grass, their eyes momentarily watered from the wind of the weaponized statue which Brandon’s little sister had just fired through three city blocks with the simplest flick of her fingers. Strangely, though, the other citizens and worshipers, even the patrolling soldiers, hardly deigned to react with anything but solemn regret and acceptance. It seemed this wasn’t the first time they’d witnessed such an easy cataclysm.

            Smoke rose in high plumes now from the massive craters in the buildings through which the Nicole statue flew. For all the force of the launch, it might as well have been a missile, too, rather than a mere blunt object.

            Despite the terror and adrenaline of watching that towering metal structure careen through the buildings after it was whittled into scrap metal by Nicole’s simpering fingertips, Brandon was feeling something new now. A sensation had been activated within. Before, he’d been victimized with a fearful erection at the unfortunate sight of his fantasies coming to life in the form of his most hated family member. Now, however, there was desire building within and rising like brushfire to his heart.

            No. This was not happening. He did not want this. Brandon clawed his fingernails into his arm in an attempt to divert the unstoppable yearning, and hopefully wilt his boner as well. There was no way in hell he was going to allow himself to desire this mad outcome for even a single sickening instant. He couldn’t possibly live with himself if he actually came to terms with the fact that today, this moment, was among the most fulfilling of his life as his bratty god-queen of a little sister dominated an entire enslaved town of peons, with him included.

            “Did you see that, man?” Jason whispered numbly. His eyes bulged in his head and he looked either on the verge of passing out or orgasming.

            Though it made him uncomfortable to notice, Brandon couldn’t help but observe that his friend was sporting a similar pants shape between the legs. That figured, Brandon thought bitterly. At least his horndog friend wasn’t related to her.

            “I’m sorry, everyone. Maybe that was… mean of me, to do away with your hard work like that,” Nicole admitted cheekily, changing from enraged to gently begrudging on a dime. She steepled the spires of her magnificent fingers together, bending them in and out like an accordion. “It’s just that it hurts me, to give out such simple instructions to all of you, and see such a big lack of respect for me and all that I’ve done for you. I mean, really, when you think about it, you little guys have the sweetest deal on earth. I give you free shelter, food, water, and friendship. All you have to do is, from time to time, show me a sign of your appreciation.”

            Nicole’s lecture boomed louder through all the canyons of the tiny city. The sound seemed to congregate and echo with more grandeur from out of the smoking ruins of the buildings she’d destroyed. If Brandon couldn’t look directly up and still see the curvaceous bulwark of his sister’s pale, sculpted thigh, he might have imagined her words were instead being expelled from out of the mysterious, smoldering darkness of the wreckage.

            “But I guess that was still too difficult a job for you, even after I lowered my expectations to the level of the dirt, where you live. Seriously, not to put down what you did get done, but that statue wouldn’t even look impressive as a keychain ornament for me. I could do so much better, if I actually wanted something that made me feel good about myself,” Nicole explained. She closed her hands together, then clapped them twice, just to make sure no one’s attention drifted; the sharp sound wracked the ears of every denizen, granting temporary tinnitus. “No, that statue was for you. For you to understand what it’s like to have a purpose in your puny, pathetic lives.”

            Brandon looked over to Jason. His friend’s face had almost transformed; he now looked remarkably like the others around them. Stoic, yet generous in his attention and clear devotion to the staggeringly giant woman sitting with her legs crossed beside the little diorama-style metropolis. Jason’s eyes remained wide open; his jaw hung ajar, and he might have been on the verge of drooling. His hand even hovered with intense need just above his pants tent, which forced Brandon to turn away in disgust.

            “I wasn’t always this generous, you know,” Nicole said. “When I first figured out how to shrink things. I was, um… let’s say a little less lenient. I didn’t really feel like it was my responsibility to care about the things I shrunk. To give them a sense of purpose. No, see, the very first time I shrunk something… this boy in my class, actually… I kicked him down the sidewalk like a pebble, then just walked right over and stomped on him a bunch of times, even though he was probably gone after just the first step. And you want to know something? I didn’t feel bad about it. Not even a little bit.”

            To demonstrate, Nicole walked two of her fingers along the far wall of the city, simulating a person, even though said person would’ve been far larger than any of the buildings within. For a minute, her fingernails clacked softly on the thick barrier, even improvising a little dance with her index and middle finger. However, as she turned her massive hand around to walk it back the other way, her opposite palm hovered overhead: a simulation of her shoe in the story. Without hesitation, she smacked her other hand down upon the helpless representation of the two-fingered walker. Though she only made slight contact with the wall, the translation of the impact through Nicole’s palm, her fingers, and into the structure caused the entire city to wobble.

            The gesture was far more violent, even, than when she first picked up the city. Any of the citizens not lying prone in the grassy clearing of the town square were toppled flat on their faces by the shuddering force of Nicole smacking a point just barely adjacent to their livelihoods.

            Brandon was one of these unfortunates knocked over. He quivered in the dirt, still playing back in his memory the image of his sister’s titanic palm descending toward the city’s imprisoning wall. Though she moved quickly, every detail of her palm, from the criss-crossing creases to the gradients of pale-and-pink skin tones, was made apparent and visible to all below. It wasn’t hard at all to imagine that same hand poised the same way, give or take half a mile closer to the gathered population. Right over their heads. One single drop of the beautiful blonde’s unforgiving palm, and thousands would die in an instant: popped into a series of red splotches painted like polka dots all along the vast canvas of Nicole’s hand.

            The boy pressed his forehead into the grass. This revelation of his sister’s first shrinkage was of particularly stomach-churning horror to Brandon. Which was saying something, considering he’d learned of Nicole’s size-changing capacities and also been added to her human collection in the same day; still, this realization beat it out. In spite of all he’d seen up to now, he still couldn’t quite imagine his sister as a cold-blooded killer: not merely a kidnapper and self-appointed goddess, but an actual murderer of innocents. Not even that trashed statue blown through the buildings had made him a believer, but the conviction of Nicole’s tender words about her first powerful act, now, did make him understand.

            Brandon was feeling greater lust than ever. He choked back the nausea again.

“Just like that,” Nicole reinforced. She dusted her hands off, and watched with evident delight the scene below of all the citizens still recovering from the impact of her palm on the wall. “But I’m not like that anymore. At least I try not to be. No, I decided there was much more value in keeping things. Making them mine. I did it with a lot of little people that I shrunk down to an inch, but after a while even that didn’t feel like enough. They respected me, and they were afraid of me, but they lived in a little box and cried whenever I showed up to play with their bodies. And that’s not what I wanted, either.”

            Nicole’s hand alighted at her thigh. Her fingers crested down the smooth, kissable flesh again. The minor indentations made in the firm wall of feminine skin by her passing digits captured the attention of everyone below. Pupils numbering in the thousands remained glue to the giant girl’s self-possessed fingertips. After massaging her outer thigh in steady circles for multiple revolutions, Nicole next curled her fingertips around the denim lip of her Daisy Dukes, which were already riding high on her ladylike quads, given her crossed legs. She tugged on her jean shorts, and several city blocks’ worth of flesh was newly revealed upon her leg, bulging with a runner’s musculature beneath the faintly glistening, lotion-anointed skin. The monumental arc of her butt cheek was in danger of swelling out of the cut-offs.

            Brandon angrily swallowed the drool which had gathered in his mouth. He wanted to look away, but he couldn’t.

            “Respect is good. And so is fear. They’re necessary, actually,” Nicole continued delicately, as she steadily revealed yet more of her thigh and the suggestion of her derriere. “But respect and fear alone are not what it takes to own things. You can own their bodies, sure… but it doesn’t mean anything.”

            Her shrunken brother gulped. He’d played through scenarios not unlike this one, both in his dreams and in the porn folder on his laptop, many a time. Never could he have guessed it would come true, but in the most dire and disgusting of circumstances. All wisdom told him to bury his head in the dirt and stop watching the show.

            “That’s when I thought to change the way I act toward the things I can make mine. I thought, why stop at shrinking one person at a time?” Nicole pondered aloud. Her fingers continued sensuously petting circles into her leg. Though gentle, the almost-musical impacts made by her powerful fingertips gathering together thumped like a heartbeat for the people below. “So I shrank a house. Then a building. Then a whole block. And then, well… I graduated to you. And I took you… all of you… for myself.”

            Brandon scanned his surroundings with new urgency. In all the excitement and confusion, he’d assumed at first that Nicole had only built a miniature city and filled it with people over time. Was this actually a complete city she’d stolen straight off the map? It had to be a joke. Didn’t it?

            “In becoming not just the owner of a person, but the… ruler of lives, I learned something for the first time. Like I said, respect and fear are necessary, but they’re only small ingredients,” Nicole stated, her words slow and methodical. She inched ever-nearer upon the surface of the desk, until her exposed thigh cast a shadow above the city, engulfing the whole town square, her brother included. “The most important part of being in control of your lives is… love. Creating it, among all of you, for me. And then I, in my own way, come to love all of you and the way you make me feel. That I’m not just a woman, a student, an owner, or even a ruler. I’m a… no, I’m your… goddess.”

            The ethereal words bore incredible weight, and not just because of the volume of Nicole’s voice ringing in everyone’s ears. It was pastoral. Like something Brandon imagined he might have barked at him during a religious ceremony.

            Yet coming from the mouth of his sister, with thousands of followers listening and processing her words, nothing rang false. It may have seemed ridiculous if he’d walked into his sister’s room now and seen her delivering this rhetoric into a little box of microscopic insect-citizens, but that was not the case. He was in here, and he was not small; Nicole was simply a celestial being.

            A goddess, through and through.

            The sensation rising inside Brandon was reaching a zenith. Though he fought it, bit his tongue and scratched his arm, he wanted to give into Nicole’s doctrine more than anything he’d ever desired in his life. He felt like crying; she was breaking his spirit, and taking it for herself, without even having to touch or directly address him.

            “This is why it upsets me, you see, when all of you lose sight of the fact that I don’t have to teach you to love me. I could teach you so many other things. Fun, for example. My fun.” Nicole’s hand abruptly ended its titillating massage upon her leg. In a blink, it transformed into a terrible claw of her vengeance. Her fingernails glinted under the attic light, flashing as she wrung her knuckles and plunged her fist down toward the city.

            Brandon and Jason, as well as all their surrounding compatriots, did their best to run. They didn’t get far. A blast of wind from Nicole’s falling hand sent them flying back, though, clear of the impact site where the statue had been. Its stone altar shattered on impact. At last, the singsong worshipers broke into fearful cries for help and pleas for mercy. Some of them screamed at the top of their lungs with double the passion of their earlier chanting.

            Of course, Nicole ignored their squeaks for justice. Like winnowing spires, the blonde’s elegant fingers made berth with the ground and burrowed deeply into the spongy earth. She churned up the grass and dirt like an industrial columbine, all with the simple spinning of her shapely fingernails. A dust cloud shrouded everything like a fog; Brandon stumbled to his knees, unable to see anything more than five feet in front of his face as his sister carried on her heartless act of annoyance. Up above, with her opposite hand, the blonde scooped up a water bottle and took a hard swig.

            Through all of this, Nicole’s expression hadn’t changed. No twitch of a muscle in her cheeks. Beautiful as she was, her serious countenance, when projected at such a city-wide magnitude, was utterly demoralizing. Those blue eyes of her swum in the manner of storm-tormented lakes.

            “What’s she doing?” Jason shouted over the commotion in Brandon’s ear. He, too, fell to the earth, hands around his head to avoid being trampled by the blearily rampaging citizens running every which way for safety. “WHY?”

            Brandon couldn’t possibly begin to answer that. His every molecule was still devoted to ignoring the pulsating joy he felt for the bratty deity’s choices, even now, in the face of possible extinction.

            Her fingers were still dancing about, tearing up the patches of grass and bowling over nearby buildings as well. The combined destruction of Nicole’s hand assured a veil of dirt and dust coated the entire central quarter of the city. Just as quickly as they’d arrived, however, her slender digits retracted into the void above. Instead, something else was happening. The young woman was bending down over the city, combing her lustrous golden locks out of her narrowed eyes.

            The pink, plush skin of Nicole’s puckered lips seemed to ripple. They briefly inflated like balloons as her cheeks puffed. The water from her bottle churned within her jaws. A thunderous gurgle emanated from her throat beyond.

            “She’s…” Jason croaked.

            A spit stream like a waterfall cascaded from the blonde’s spitefully pursed lips.

The descent of Nicole’s spit didn’t flow like a river, but ponderous and threatening, as the saliva and water fell in dollops, before the longest string curled down into the town square over the site of the statue. But a brief pause followed before Nicole gathered more moisture and rained that down as well.

            Waves of frothy, bubblegum-scented spit flowed outward in a flash flood. Brandon yanked his friend back to his feet and off they sprinted again, still unclear which way was safest amongst the dust storm, but knowing anywhere away from his sister’s tidal wave of drool was the correct one. Try as they might, the rolling soup of spit caught up to them before they could even reach the streets again. They, along with countless other citizens, were washed into the molasses-like sea of Nicole’s angry spittle.

            As Brandon rocked on the sticky wave, trying to keep his head above water, he tried to ride in the same direction as Jason, but found it too difficult to tread spit and keep a hold of his friend’s hand. On high, a spurned goddess savored the sight of her loyal subjects flung into makeshift biblical plagues by a simple flick of her fingers and a hock in her throat. The sky over the city filled with rumbling, infectious laughter.

            Nicole took another hard slurp from her water bottle. Swishing the beverage around her warm cave of a mouth, her lips pouted like a spigot and a fresh deluge of saliva-water spilled into the streets. Thrice more she repeated this act, chugging up liquid until her cheeks bulged, then spraying the mess down upon the city. After five flash-floods, there was enough froth trickling across the surface to put the whole town square underwater.

            Concurrently with the mounting rainstorm of Nicole’s spit, her fingers busied themselves again in the brittle landscape. Not content merely churning up the dirt this time, the girl flattened her palm to the ground and thrust with all her strength as if administering CPR to the chest of the city itself. Brandon only had time to peek with one eye open through the spiraling clouds before the shockwave of his sister’s palm smacked him into the nearest smear of dribbling drool making its way down the sidewalk. Several more pulses followed: Nicole’s entire hand poised to the heart of the town, large enough to collect buildings by the handful into her clawed clutches if she decided that was her fancy. As it happened, she was just fine simply flicking her pinky finger into a single structure; the four-story stone monument buckled instantly and puffed plumes of dust across the square anew as it crumbled to the ground.

            “Jason!” Brandon croaked. “JASON!” He searched blindly for his friend as he braced himself against the tide of undulating spit-water and the latest windblast. But his fellow unwitting prisoner was nowhere to be seen. Rubble particles and ash turned the air white as snow. At first Brandon thought he heard his friend shouting back at him in response, until he deduced it was only the intermingled cries of hundreds of panicked Nicole-faithful. They were definitively separated now, if not by the dust cloud and spit waves, than by the flailing citizens in mad flight.

            Though the town square of the interned little city was in utter chaos, the visage at the level of the statosphere had become far more suggestive of a storm. Everyone’s darkly benevolent goddess Nicole was shifting her position. Her dreamily cream-hued thigh had long acted as sentinel near the wall where the blonde tempted the citizens with the sight of her flesh and the crest of her ass cheek, but she was on the move now. Nicole uncrossed her limb from its neighboring knee and took a stand before the desk, her majestic torso now filling up the skyline above the town. For a minute, the girl simply observed her work, cupping her hand to stifle a few lingering giggles, and then reached her island-sized palms toward opposing border walls.

            Even after the destructive spire of Nicole’s finger had abandoned the scene of the crime, the windy cloud still spun across the area and into the streets, obscuring sight like midmorning fog. When the unspooling flood waters of the girl’s spittle had come to rest, another seismic jolt shuddered through the paltry bedrock of the entire metropolis. The girl’s fingers had wrapped back over the high border walls. Nicole exhaled, and lifted.

            Brandon lay in the street, half-submerged in a warm bubble of his sister’s spit. Just as he fought to stand up, that bubble burst when Nicole grasped the city again to pick it up, and he was thrown down. Through the haze of rising sandstorm grit, he thought he could make out the shape of his friend Jason sprawled down the block, past another two dozen worshipers. The trembling of the earth had become so violent, though, that all Brandon could do was wrap his arms around a sign post by his elbow and pray that his sister saw fit to put her subjects down on solid ground soon.

            Nicole did indeed set the city on the ground by her feet, and then took a step back. Though hardly anyone below noticed while they were contending with the dust storm and pooled spit, she was undoing the button on her tattered Daisy Dukes cutoff jeans. Her thumbs pried back the thin waistband, and the richly immodest garment fell down the pillars of her legs to the ground; Nicole stepped delicately out of the jeans on the balls of her feet, then kicked the denim bundle under the bed. She was left in a pair of baby-blue panties so narrow they barely concealed the tight mound at the union of her thighs. Feet spread wide, the girl took two broad steps forward, until she formed a heavenly arch from her pale, towering legs above the city, with the dainty blue fabric of her panties as the crowning pinnacle of the parabola.

            In the street beneath, Brandon wiped dust and feminine saliva away from his face. Squinting, he could just make out the altered shape of the sky, and became aware that his sister was literally standing over top of the entire city, with her panty-clad pussy poised directly above the town square, give or take a mile. Even at this distance, the boy could not only make out the crescent crack of his sister’s ass, but also the ribbed dunes of her vaginal petals pushing against the underwear. His throat caught, and he almost choked; a fresh blast of lust coursed through him like a triple B12 shot.

            The very thought of ever being treated to this view would’ve repulsed him to his soul for his life right up to a couple hours prior. But that was then, this was now, and Brandon was now trembling with need for his giantess sister’s magnificent form and her world-conquering attitude; he was pretty sure if anyone even touched his rock-hard erection at this point, he’d burst in his pants.

            Other citizens were at least succeeding in ungluing themselves from the messy state of the lawns and streets. Fighting to right themselves, yet remaining on bended knee, the silent masses took their punishment without another screamed gripe. Some even went right back to song and praise.

            “Listen, all of you, and listen well. Though I will not hesitate to let you know when my feelings are hurt, there is no cause for despair. I do not want you be only afraid of your goddess, my little ones,” Nicole murmured regally. She fell just as easily back into her mighty biblical-speak. Her elegant pinky finger played coyly with the papery band of her panties and snapped the string softly on her skin. Rumbling snickers echoed through the street again. “Like I said, I do require your fear and respect, but your love is and always will be my highest goal. For love is what I feel most for you, as you are mine, and mine alone. And to demonstrate that love in a way as tangible as I’ve demonstrated my temporary displeasure, I want you all to look up and see what I have done for you.”

            Brandon thought his sister’s last request a little redundant; anyone still able-bodied strewn about the sticky battlefield of the town square was already looking up at Nicole. And what’s more, they saw exactly what she’d “done” for them.

            The golden goddess’s panties were pooling dark with erotic fluid. By the flush of her skin and the relaxed tension in her muscles, it was clear this preliminary emission was no accident. Brandon saw very clearly that she was sopping wet for the city itself, its thousands of citizens, and the very idea that they belonged to her.

“You see it, don’t you?” Nicole purred. She ran a finger through the valley of her nethers over the panties, and came away with a dab of glistening liquid on the tip of her digit. “I don’t want to scare and hurt you. No, that’s the last thing I want. Instead, I want you to worship, with everything you have, the very love that I have for each and every one of you. Will you do this for me?”

            “Yes, Goddess!” responded the crowd in robotic sexual unison.

            “I can’t hear you.” The blonde was at last tugging the strings of her panties down her thighs. Like a parachute, the fabric spread wider and wrung droplets of the precious liquid into the street below, splashing down on the grateful citizens. When Nicole had at last pulled her underwear off the ends of her toes, she was completely naked below the waist: the graceful and statuesque form of her smooth, moist womanhood was made an idol on high.

            “Yes, Goddess!”

            “I said I can’t hear you.”

            “YES, GODDESS!” The answer came in the form of a bellow this time, but lost none of its potency. Every voice was honeyed with desire. Men and women of all ages genuflected, hands over their hearts, and gazed unblinking up into the makeshift sun that was Nicole’s damp pussy. Looking to his side, Brandon noted that Jason was shouting with just as much energy as anyone around him, if not more. It took conscious focus for Brandon to keep his own lips from opening and declaring his intent in tandem with the crowd to worship his sister’s cunt, but he held strong.

            “See the good works I will lay before you,” Nicole threatened with immense affection. She separated the great curtains of her vaginal lips as though this moment was the unveiling of a stage in the sky. With two fingers still prying the tender flesh apart, she slid her index finger into the gaping chasm beneath. Lubed as she already was from her prior speechmaking to her toy town, her finger was accepted easily into the tunnel. Several more drops of hot, frothing fluid gushed from between her digits and plopped into the ruined square below.

            Thus poised, Nicole began to masturbate. There was no mistaking her intentions below, either by the city-wide sky writing of her luscious fingertips or the tactile precipitation of ejaculate. What began as a demonstration of her love was turning into an outright gift to the troubled peoples. Her index finger swiped in and out of her widened slit, running the shaft of her digit along every dimension of the inner cavern. Simultaneously, still another finger curled up, pushed back the hood and teased at the cherried nub beneath. The musculature of Nicole’s legs quavered, tightening and loosening in rapid spasms at the contact with her clitoris. Her breathing was becoming the thunder of the sticky rainstorm, with air aching loudly in her lungs, then expelling in the form of a desperate moan, elongated like a drag on a cigar.

            Brandon separated his arms to their full wingspan and balled his hands into fists. It was all he could do to keep from nudging himself in the crotch. Just once. His body was curious on a molecular level what it would feel like to embrace the insanity of the psycho-sexual-religious momentum Nicole was drumming, and live inside the no-doubt rapturous orgasm which would result for several sustained seconds. But he refrained. Whatever shred of dignity he still possessed deep within kept him from acting. Knuckles whitened, he panted for release and spread himself out flat on the sidewalk, while everyone else around him clasped their hands in prayer for the coming fall of the giant blonde’s cum. Jason included.

            Brandon gritted his teeth. He would endure.

            Up above, Nicole was bringing the storm of her fluffing session down to the level of the common microscopic man. Her thighs bulged as they bore increasing fractions of her slender weight, bending at the knees. Those calves rounded out into sculpted hills, and Nicole was squatting down over the city. Her fingers didn’t cease their practiced dance for even an instant as she passed toward the ground with deliberate slowness, a quarter inch every second. She was balletic in her precision. The lower the girl’s body descended, with her drooling nethers leading the charge, the further her luminous butt cheeks spread. This separation revealed her rear in every nook and cranny of its athletic glory.

            Almost in agony now with need, Brandon looked to Jason. His friend, along with several other overzealous stalwarts, were removing their pants without tearing their eyes away from the vaginal sky.

            Now in a full squat, the enormous girl’s broadened thighs and sluicing pussy blotted out the rest of the bedroom ceiling. There was no other segment of Nicole visible to her cult followers save for this most cherished zone. That stripe of her body stretching from top curve of her ass, all the way under and back to the pink lips of her pussy, was hallowed ground to the citizens: a holy land that all could aspire to covet. And right now, it was being displayed before them as plain and wonderful as the rising of a new day.

            “Touch yourselves,” Nicole commanded in slurred whisper. Though her volume was low and flinty, it funneled directly into the city, and everyone heard the order deep in their bones. She swallowed another throaty moan and managed to spit out the rest of the decree. “Everyone, with me now. Your bodies belong to me, and as such, every part of your bodies. So then your hands are mine, and I tell you now, that all of my hands down in that pathetic little city of yours will worship through the production of pleasure, NOW. Touch yourselves, do not stop until I instruct, and know that I am good to you. Know that through my love, and my love alone, will you come to understand your true purposes in the grand cycle of existence.”

            Many citizens were already down to their skivvies, in evident undying hope for this very declaration. Those that had remained in prayer, though, acted without a second thought. Pants were shorn open, and skirts were ripped as every single person in the concrete valley of the city below Nicole shoved their hands between their legs and took firm hold of their junk. Not an eye was cast to a neighbor or to genitals, but solely skyward for the angelic hostess of Nicole’s pulsating vulva and her furiously masturbating fingers.

            Only Brandon stood alone now. Only he had yet to cross the line. And even though no one in the city nor Nicole paid an iota of attention to him, the young man felt the keen throes of pressure: for his respect, his admiration, his sexual release, his survival, and for his very soul. There was a magnetic force tugging on him, and willing Brandon to give in and join the service to his giant sister’s gift. If he stood up, he worried that force might become a gravitational pull and suck him directly into those undulating pussy lips. In such an event, he’d likely go completely unnoticed by Nicole, who would carry on plunging her fingers into the engorged tunnel between her legs and tracing circles around her clit, while Brandon would enter a finger-mashing hell of molten ejaculate and quivering genitalia flesh: stuck like a crumb to her skin and passed adhesively from one celestial body to the other.

            “Oh, God…” Nicole cried.

            “Oh, Nicole,” droned her lackeys.

            “That’s right. Bring it to the edge… don’t stop… don’t you dare stop, any single one of you. Not until I say. Hang on. Just hang on,” Nicole chanted. “Only I can release you.” Breathless, hungry, yet in control. Even in passion, her guise did not drop.

            It was clear to everyone, Brandon more than most, that this was not just some act she put on for the little creatures of her bedroom. The preppy and air-headed visage of popular blonde college-student Nicole was the act: a mask she wore to fool the unknowing mortals who could never conceive of her true potential as a ruler and condemner of civilizations. This version of her, owning minds with a single word, crouching over an entire city and altering the weather via her hypnotizing masturbation, was the real Nicole.

            The truth had been fully peeled back, and now, Brandon wasn’t sure he knew how to put it back. He wasn’t certain he wanted to, either. His hands had lost their previous resolve, and hovered over his crotch, itching to pay homage to his goddess of a sibling. Brandon’s face flushed red.

            He couldn’t give in.

Like the crystalline stem of a flower, a gooey string of ejaculate extended in whole from Nicole’s vagina all the way down to the lowly street. Steadily, those citizens gathered nearest ground zero rose to their feet and began to waddle like zombies toward the slow stream of cum. All kept their hands around their privates, of course, several nearly staggering over from the effort of pulling and fingering themselves.

            When they reached the ever-spreading pool of ejaculate beneath the thin gooey waterfall, they fell to their knees and drunk deeply from the surging puddle of Nicole’s juices. Before long, at least a hundred worshipers had joined the act: one hand engaged below the belt, and the other thirstily scooping up mouthful after mouthful of the giantess’s succulent love fluids. Jason was among the first suckers in line to drink from the syrupy pool.

            “Before… we reach the end of this display of love, for your goddess and for your ownership by that goddess… I have… one last thing to say…” Nicole boomed. With a thumb over her clit and three fingers jammed below, the storm cycle of her masturbation had risen to a fever pitch. As the girl’s breathing became more labored, she gasped shallowly between phrases, but still managed to articulate the words with the same fervor. “…to the newest members of the community. To little Jason, my eager little puppy dog boy, who’s… wanted me for as long as he’s known me but could never have me, and… especially to my… little… little… teeny tiny big brother, Brandon… who I love… more than any other of you pathetic specks in all my whole wide world.”

            Brandon went all but catatonic. He felt as though the sensitivity had bloomed over every micrometer of skin; if he was touched now, he might collapse from simultaneous exhaustion, pain, and orgasm. Trembling, he felt the faces of more than a hundred loyal worshipers turning slowly to him. Never had he been so exposed.

            Nicole’s priestly words were still roiling around between Brandon’s ears, and he had yet to process them. What, exactly, did she just say again? No matter how many times he replayed the sound of her voice, the words pinged right off his skull. This was still his little sister: the girl with whom he’d spent nineteen years in near-constant rivalry, annoying and pranking each other to the brink of familial collapse, coming as close as two people could come to devoting a lifetime to hatred.

            “My love must come as a surprise to you, little brother,” Nicole continued. Her purr rumbled through every street corner of the town, and likely reached the other miniature cities littered around her bedroom as well. Literally, her whole wide world inside the bedroom was on its knees, dangling from her every word. “The truth is, I’m not sure I could have, back when you were taller than me. It just didn’t make sense. But this, now? With you, down there, struggling against your own feelings of submission like I know you are? Well, this feels just about right. Just about perfect. Doesn’t it, Brandon?”

            He opened his lips to respond, until he remembered there was no earthly way she could hear his words from so far above. Nor, he supposed, would Nicole actually care what he had to say on the matter. All that actually meant anything was her omniscient and omnipotent judgment on his mite-size soul.

            “I don’t know,” he whispered in answer, despite the knowledge his sibling wouldn’t get the message. He shuddered again from deep in his gut, and couldn’t say whether he was closer to tears or cumming now. This was a new kind of brokenness he’d never have thought possible to achieve in his life, not even with years of hypothetical torture, and certainly not in a single morning in his little sister’s bedroom.  Yet that was what happened.

            “I just want you to know, Brandon, before you let go of all the doubts and give in to me, that this doesn’t have to feel wrong. The only reason you’re telling yourself that it’s wrong is based on everything you’ve ever thought before I shrunk you,” Nicole continued breathily. Her fingers had halted their mad piston dance through the hanging lips of her pussy, though there was still a plentiful pond of crystal ejaculate in the square for the masses to drink. “But does what’s happening to you right now make any sense with what you knew before? Has it helped you understand any better what it means to be a puny bug to a goddess by resisting what’s inside your heart?”

            “No,” Brandon heard himself say aloud.

            “It hasn’t,” Nicole answered for him. “And wherever you are down there, whatever it is you think you’re feeling, if you’re fighting it, then you’re not being honest with yourself. And all I ask of my subjects… you and Jason included now… is fear, respect, love. And honesty. The last part. So be truthful with yourself now. Give in, little brother. Give in, and be thankful that I have remade your life in a way that will let you give back with everything you have, until the end of your days. Worship me.”

            In the sway of her words, Nicole’s fingers returned to their glorious purpose. Her thumb resumed revolving around the sun of her clit. The last of her humbling proclamation smoothly transformed back into animal cries for sexual release from deep in her throat. Fresh, glistening brooks of fluid spattered from the sky, between her monumental fingers, and into the tiny mouths of Nicole’s followers.

            Tears streaming down his cheeks now, Brandon undid the belt on his pants, his hands shaking so much he could barely manage. It was difficult to see through the blur, but by leaning his head back against the wet, cool concrete, he could take in the sight of his sister’s full form squatting over the earth and delivering her goods unto them. She really was a goddess; he could scarcely even remember now how he might’ve viewed her as a mere girl, a college student, a sister, or even a human being. It was clear now and forever that she was so much more than that. As if disembodied, guided only by his sister’s words, the boy took hold of his member and joined the ritual of jerking and fingering taking place on a city-wide basis.

            The need to touch himself was all but superficial at this point; poised at the edge as he was, in ten seconds Brandon spasmed in the road, surrounded in puddles of Nicole’s saliva and intermingled with droplets of vaginal dew. With that release, the last doubts and disgust exited his body. His climax was as sickly fulfilling as it was explosive. For minutes afterward, he floated in the afterglow of pleasures he would’ve never thought possible to achieve. All around him, the happy sexual songs of others reaching their orgasm as well joined his. Nicole’s voice was the most prominent, of course, with an enchanting moan that blasted over a thousand others and shattered windows on the outskirts of town.

            “Come to me. Come to me, everyone,” she chanted.

            In the square below, the goddess’s finger lowered into the sticky miasma where her subjects hungrily filled their bellies with her juices. With incredible delicacy, she stirred the liquid through the field using the mast of her finger, carrying the cum-drunken worshipers on a swirling journey.

            With his last reserves of strength before he collapsed from weariness and satisfaction, Brandon dragged himself back into the grass. On his hands and knees now, he crawled into the gently rotating river of rippling ejaculate. Nicole’s finger came along on its next arc, and Brandon allowed himself to adhere to the near-infinite spire of her lovely digit. Others joined him, their half-naked bodies glued to her skin and lullabied with the last lingering coos from their ruler as they spun sweetly through the drifting pool.

            Brandon’s life was at last in sync with his sister’s world.

A bell tolled from somewhere in the distance.

            Yawning, Brandon hopped out of bed with a smile on his face. To his left in the opposing bunk was Jason, still dreaming peacefully. Shaking his friend awake, Brandon followed the sound of the bell down the stairs of the dormitory. In the bottom floor, he passed fellow citizens, some of them looking as glad as him, and some infected with depression, for the exact same reasons. Most of the sadder and less enthused individuals were new inductees to the city: people Nicole had scooped off the street or from her college campus.

            Their poor outlook was difficult for Brandon to understand. He might’ve bought into it a year ago, when Nicole first added him and Jason to her collection, but now he could only gawk at them and shake his head. The sooner they learned the pecking order, the sooner they could find bliss in this place.

            Out in the streets, Brandon was joined quickly by Jason. Still grinning ear-to-ear, the pair made their way into the flowing marathon line of workers marching to the center of the city. Hundreds were already hard at work. In the center of the grassy clearing was the golden construction of a new statue twice as tall as the last pathetic effort: currently, only the Nicole look-alike’s feet and lower calves had been molded, but a renewed vigor filled the streets.

            This offering would be a success. Maybe it had something to do with the inspiration of Brandon’s turn, and his sister’s public declaration of love for him as his goddess; either way, the city had taken her message of worship to heart with a vengeance.

            The bell toll stopped, but the work had only just begun. Sweating already, Brandon was invigorated like never before as he helped pass tools gold plates in the human assembly line. Later, he’d be on duty helping hoist up the next segment of the statue’s calf muscle. He was looking forward to that.

            Above the skyline crest of the buildings, a shadow overtook the urban structure. A form loomed which put to shame the majestic heights of even the city’s tallest skyscrapers. Nicole’s fingers curled one by one over the wall, the looped grooves of the tips massaging the stone. Her lake-blue eyes peered into the heart of civilization, as the full mass of the girl’s countenance took shape in their view.

            Instantly, work came to a half, and hands were on the ground. Heads bowed, and silence obscured the previous construction-related chatter; only Nicole’s calm, windy breathing punctuated the morning stillness. Both Brandon and Jason, side by side in the grass, looked proudly toward the horizon of her beautiful face and wispy blonde halo filling the void.

            “Hello, my precious little creatures,” she boomed in murmur. Those fingers drummed contentedly on the inner walls. Her eyes narrowed, studying the birth of the sculpture. “I see you’ve been keeping busy to make up for the last embarrassment of tribute. This one looks to be much more promising, and worthy of my love for you. Keep up work of this kind, and you’ll never need to anticipate my wrath again. Or at least for as long as you earn it.” With that, Nicole blew a wet, lustful kiss into the city; a few microbial sprays of warm saliva even landed amongst the masses.

            “I’ll be away at school for a while now,” Nicole crooned, as she drifted once again from view, until only her voice held them all in aching thrall. “Be good now: work your hearts out, and think only of me. When I return, if I am pleased with your progress, then I think we could find a reward beneficial to all of you, and me as well. I hope that will be enough to lift your spirits into action.”

            It was indeed.

            The citizens broke into thankful prayers and shouts of glory, some in more reverent manner than others. Even the bitter naysayers found the strength to summon a few words of praise for her. Gladly, there was no longer a need for the patrolling troops which inhabited the space when Brandon first arrived; everyone, whether their hearts were yet fully dedicated to Nicole or not, at least understood their physical place. Though the work had to resume in a few minutes, there was just enough time to pause and thank the Nicole-owned heavens. Jason was already jackhammering his cock, while Brandon instead chose the more pious morning ritual of mentally languishing on his devotion to his goddess-sibling and the many gifts she’d given him this past year; even in spite of this humble thinking, though, his pants were beginning to tent already, as it so often happened at the mere appearance of his adoring goddess over the city.

            But who could possibly blame him for his belief?