Humanity had achieved an era of prosperity. Violence around the world, on all scales and fronts, gradually quelled across generations of peace, an ongoing pride that could only have manifested with the breakthrough success of dimensional technology. It had been discovered and then developed upon, the science of creating tears in the very fabric of reality so that other realms could be reached; in these radically barren worlds, there were plentiful material resources to mine from, without an existing population of any kind to be taken from. Thus were the otherwise endless tensions over materials largely dismissed between the strongest nations, ushering an advanced age that reprioritized the needs of the people above military might.
These portals were inexpensive to create, permanent where they were made with only marginal upkeep costs. What any one portal could do for its community far outweighed any burden it placed upon it; more and more cities were eager to have portals nearby of their own, these huge holes of electric energy that could be seen from a mile away. Citizens looked forward to what world would be discovered and exploited next, what resources they would gather and how it would vitalize their economy.
That hope was at its peak as the latest portal was prepared to be opened. The gate, as it was referred to, was built in the hilly terrain found a few miles north of a major city, and surrounding its wide base were the machinations that would keep the expedition functioning. Warehouses and processing plants were built in advance outside the gate, and other facilities were established for housing the faculty that would manage the site. Long stretches of solar panels were linked together in the open, deforested plains, and with the sun beaming down on them with the heat of noon, it was the ideal time to activate the portal and proceed into a new, unexplored realm of reality.
Midnight -- plainly quiet, more so than usual. Another uneventful evening had gone by, and Rachel found herself awake only because she was not yet tired enough to retire to bed. She had lounged in her den and scrolled through social media for the past hour, comfortable in her sleep shorts and lengthy t-shirt, but ever anxious without something exciting to do. Her boyfriend was asleep upstairs, and no friends were online to keep her interest either. Idle where she sat doing nothing more than sipping ice water, she mused the idea of forcing herself to bed, fingers fidgeting at the tie that kept her dark hair back in a ponytail.
But before she could unwind any more than she was, a wicked snap of sound startled her into a gasp that splashed water onto her bare legs. Rachel looked over the couch and towards the door to the garage, from where she heard that distinct and sudden noise; at the same time, what few household lights were on began to flicker, if only for a second. Afterwards, the scene was as ordinary as before, but Rachel was still stiff in the corner of the couch, clutching the chest of her shirt while glaring at the door. In the air, she felt something resonating, akin to static clinging to her skin, and she swore that there was a low droning stemming from the garage -- something had obviously occurred.
Rachel waited a minute where she was, expecting her boyfriend to have been awoken, but he did not appear. Without him there, it was on her to investigate, which she took on with a skeptical sigh. She assumed that it was related to the circuit breaker, something more mundane than what her imagination came up with. Hesitantly opening the door, she remarked under her breath, “I better not get electrocuted from this…”
She had been prepared to see the inside of her garage cast in shadows like normal, with her vehicle in its corner, the walls edged with old belongings in cardboard boxes. What instantly took her off-guard was what glowed opposite of her, bright enough to make her squint as she hung by the doorframe. Shaped like a circle that hovered an inch off the ground, it appeared like a window in the air itself, its rim shaped nebulously with spikes of electrical currents occasionally surging around the outline. Whatever was on the other side -- a concept Rachel was still grappling with -- appeared distorted and dotty like an oil painting. Her eyes sparkled with wonder, worry, but most of all, curiosity.
“This is some sci-fi-type of stuff,” Rachel joked, gravitating up to the phenomenon. Her bare soles shivered on the concrete floor as she approached cautiously one step at a time. Initially, she ignored the grit of texture her feet laid upon, believing it to be dust or dirt brought in from outside, but larger, denser chunks popping beneath her could not go overlooked. After a noticeable crack was heard, Rachel reflexively lifted the offending foot and glared at the shadow-covered floor. “C’mon,” she groaned impatiently, “what even is this…?”
The ordinary that she expected to observe was once again absent. When Rachel turned her sole upwards thinking she would be brushing away a pebble or some trash, she instead saw three shard-like pieces pressed into the skin, stuck there like the actual grains and hairs were. Rachel scoffed, “Toys…?” It was her best deduction in the dark, that these were toy trucks she had accidentally stepped on. She grimaced, “So weak, though…”
Before she could lose her balance on the one leg, Rachel peeled apart one of the trucks, lowering her foot to the ground as to shake away the others. Pinched in two fingers was the flattened scrap of a vehicle; windows were shattered, tires were dislodged except for one hanging by a thread, and rising from the mess was a vapor. The realism was enough to stall Rachel as she looked it over, but there was something else to be found in the wreckage, a movement that bobbed weakly from the covered load of the truck. Rachel’s eyes widened as the crumpled doors were unwedged apart, revealing a diminutive human that strained itself to crawl out and onto the precarious cliff of a finger -- it was a survivor, a true living person barely left alive on the pad of her thumb.
In disbelief, Rachel neared her baffled expression close to her finger. The uniformed and injured figure shuddered beneath her stare, shuffling close to the totaled truck with nowhere else to flee. It appeared to dawn on him the exact predicament he was caught in, that he was pinched up by this behemoth of a person and lifted eerily close to her lake-sized eyes of green. She studied his frightened responses, how he was in shambles trying to balance himself atop the roundness of her thumb. When she blinked, the man flinched and cowered from her lashes, earning her a laugh she kept restrained -- for now.
That amused energy within Rachel inspired her to look back down at her feet. Her toes curled with excitement and a scoffed laugh was able to escape her lips, for surrounding her where she stood was a swarm of similarly-sized insects; multitudes of various vehicles, operated by dozens of tiny men and women outfitted all the same. In their panicked response to her arrival, the numerous crews of expeditioners had scattered away near-blindly across the garage, hurrying to make any distance away from her meteoric footfalls. Now spread all around her, Rachel could twist in any direction and see dots of them together in crowds, their speedy retreat translated to her as a sluggish attempt of getting away.
Lost in the confusion, a particular trio of trucks rushed between Rachel’s legs, passing under her body as though it were a sky-reaching arch. Others nearby would be caught along with them when Rachel cut off their paths with her wall-like soles, giggling as she awkwardly corralled teams into one cluster of vehicles and the expeditioners managing them. Surrounded by her feet, the belittled workers abandoned their vehicles and gawked upwards, straining to perceive the skyscraper legs for what they truly were.
The left foot was held high over their heads, taunting them with toes that twisted with excitement. Rachel bit her lip harshly; though she said nothing at the time, her mind raced with images of fantasy, all so vivid and colorful. Losing grip of her impulses, Rachel brought her foot down, moaning before it even made contact. Crunch -- the defeat of several trucks and their cargo, as well as the souls between them, sounded similarly to a crisp leaf crackling underfoot. From her bare sole ran a shiver of pleasure straight up her spine, causing her to gasp and smile wide as she looked down at the results. She had to muffle her laughter when she slid her foot back, revealing a skid of mangled metal and remains.
Not everyone had succumbed to that spontaneous destruction. Some had rushed away and dodged the footfall successfully, though even they were staggered by Rachel’s step and the tremor it produced. Tauntingly, that devil of a foot began twisting side to side, grinding what was under the toes into the flattest form it could be. These survivors despaired or fled desperately, but none had escaped Rachel’s notice nor her intent with them.
Rachel ducked down and giddily plucked up the remaining expeditioners, her marginal sense of care for them drastically dwindling into nothing. She carried them all in the grip of that same fist, maintaining the pinch-hold of a truck with her other hand; in moments, she had collected everyone of her interest, for then disregarding the masses that had spread deeper into the garage. Rachel had enough to satiate her, but the portal in her garage called for her, promising much more of what she had already taken.
She looked at her hands, her eyes welling up with the most pity she would ever shed for them. “You unfortunate little things,” she cooed into her palm, opening it so that the survivors could be seen. There was no organization in how they tumbled across the palm, the only unity among them being their overwhelming fear of their captor. After having demonstrated a sample of her raw strength, the survivors dreaded what she would do next, and Rachel was tickled to proceed. It was her decision that they deserved to know: “All of you have no idea how much I’ve wished for this.”
A smirk broke proudly between her flushed cheeks, her stare melting into a sultry expression. With the group innately captivated by that who held them, they watched as Rachel brought that pinch of fingers into view; they recognized the crushed truck as their own, as well as the paralyzed driver. It was made certain that they acknowledged him, just before he and his vehicle were consumed by a bite of lips. Rachel’s fingers slipped into her mouth, smoothly being removed to reveal her cleaned fingertips. There was no man, not even the truck; all eyes bent towards the motion of Rachel’s mouth as it clearly played with its food, making a show of it being gulped down. The survivors were paled by the horror they witnessed, sickened when the giant’s giggle rang like a bell to complete the tragedy.
Rachel admittedly felt silly for her act, but she had also never felt stronger. She breathed in, cherishing this absolute empowerment as she tread up to the portal. Ranks of expeditioners were broken apart as careless footsteps marched through the otherwise short distance, their destruction only serving as a bubble of entertainment in the back of the woman’s mind. She would not forget them, but she was driven to enter that portal, eager to discover the land from which these diminutive people herald from.
Without warning, Rachel dragged her tongue up her palm and between two fingers. Survivors in that hand were whipped into dodging the massive muscle as it bulldozed their lonely platform, easily picking up those caught in its path. They vanished, less than a snack that Rachel enjoyed as she stepped into the weird warmth of the portal.
“Sorry,” she said in an abrupt giggle. It was worth the apology, though she would not elaborate it to the people beneath her -- it was kept to herself, the terrible fact that she was a size fetishist invading upon a tiny realm.
A warm afternoon wind welcomed Rachel as she entered into a different world, paused by the miracle it was to have warped to somewhere so much different than her humble garage. It frightened her, truly, to no longer be surrounded by walls and instead be in the middle of an open field, a featureless and dry plain, except for the technology that encircled her. It took several moments and blinks for Rachel to move again, overcoming some teleportation-sickness before really delving into the details of this miniaturized landscape -- that which was beneath her went almost ignored, until a jostled step forward immediately crunched into something metal, but fragile. Breaking apart under the balls of her sole was a vehicle, so she realized after gripping the mangled thing into her toes and lifting it off the ground. Flattened like it was, Rachel could only assume it had been a truck, as many others similar to it were arranged around her, aided by heavier vehicles and tools. She balanced herself on the one leg as her stare of wonder was cast upon the setup; an excavation facility, fully-equipped for traversing dimensions and gathering mountains of resources.
But that grand mission was beneath Rachel, as all things in this world appeared to be. Her smile proudly heralded her obliviousness to their purpose; she saw only her fantasies painted in vivid reality. In the moments following her arrival, panic blew out from the expedition teams that had been awaiting departure. The crews behind the maintenance and operation of the portal reported a full-breakdown of procedure, imposed upon by a situation never before conceived -- they struggled to describe the event, stuttering over the fact that it was a woman, improbably huge and reeking havoc in just a set of pajamas. So many of the units stood by their posts in awe of Rachel’s baffling existence, but just as many took initiative to flee while they could, perhaps sensing the darkness behind the giant woman’s expression.
Rachel giggled in excitement, confirming where she would put her foot back down. A square plot of mining trucks was irresistible to her, earning the misfortune of her next step forward. With the initial truck still minced in her toes, she dropped her foot down on her target, crunching down on the vehicles and those too perplexed to dodge. The sensation tickled her sole, like bumps of sand flattening underfoot; the pleasure shivered up the bareness of her leg and up her spine, a ping of energy that absolutely encouraged her.
“Holy shit,” Rachel remarked, her fists clenching in anticipation. Laughter bounced in her chest, awkwardly difficult to contain -- she had rarely felt so hyped over anything. She took another joyful step forward, practically skipping into the next square of trucks, and then another. It became a march of destruction, each footfall harder and faster as she allowed her playfulness to take over unabashedly. It made no difference what horror she put upon the lives below, deaf and blind to their perspectives as they scurried through the designs of their own excavation plans, suddenly stormed upon by the thunder of a giant’s stomping spree. Before long, the main docking area of the portal site had been dashed through by a trail of specifically-shaped craters, left behind by Rachel as she happily continued outward.
It was unmissable: down a stretch of highway was the skyline of a wide metropolis, the high-populous city that the portal was intended to energize with its income of resources. To Rachel, it was a stroll away, and she was eager to reach it as soon as possible, dreaming ahead of what fun it would be to stand head-to-roof with so many skyscrapers. It made the portal site seem boring by comparison, an appetizer that she was already done with; she thought to terrorize the teams more, observing how they retreated into a grid of solar panels and the narrow pathways between them. When trying to count their heads, she quit with a laugh, realizing how little their lives meant, and thus she continued with as much haste as before. Her feet launched onto the power grid, carving her way through the generators regardless of how many were trapped in her trajectory.
The thundering of her approach resonated through the many residences in front of Rachel. The lone road from the portal bent into a highway that she followed into the rings of a flourishing community, the landscape cultivated around a colorful suburbia. Winding roads and cul-de-sacs made for peaceful imagery, but everything shuddered as Rachel rose around their horizon of trees and rooftops. The giant, just as she was described in the emergency broadcasts, was upon them sooner than any family could prepare; Rachel’s feet crashed into blocks of homes at a time, like a pattern of bombs dropped from the sky. She was fond of the flatness that instantly developed under one such step, satisfied enough to kick forward and wriggle the debris through her toes as if it were sand. A row of homes was no more, and the few survivors were noticed between her toes, completely blindsided by the bombardment of a woman’s foot. Deeming them insignificant, Rachel flexed her toes dismissively and jogged onwards into the city proper.
The unease that plagued the population had been calm and controllable; so many citizens crowded about in disbelief and uncertainty, some yet unsure if the reports could be trusted. It was a hilarious idea that their planet’s prosperity would be upended by one girl, out of control and loose from a dimension magnitudes larger than them. But when the quakes reached their buildings, when they could hear the booms of her footfall, when they finally saw the brunette’s tallness parading up the streets, all doubt was washed away. Everyone fell into the same panic, an uproar of screams that activated only when her image was revealed to them.
A wave ran through Rachel as she debuted into an outer district, an energy that nearly overwhelmed her. Countless perspectives from every direction were pointed onto her, and Rachel felt it, the sheer power of the population’s reaction. She had marched confidently into the metropolis, but upon entering one of the wider streets, her pace slowed and her arms curled inwards. The multi-lane road below was jammed with traffic, clusters of cars stopping and swerving in response to where her feet were decidedly placed; everything she did had a consequence, from how her heels shifted in the pavement, to how glass windows cracked against her lightest touch. The tiny world revolved around her, a daunting dynamic, but one that she had deeply dreamed about before.
Speechlessly, Rachel followed the flutter of her heart, which pulled her in the direction of a city bus stalled in the traffic. It started and stopped as the driver made sense of the chaos around him and his passengers -- a delectable target to begin with. Two strides forward, and Rachel’s heel slammed into the back of the bus, crunching the segment like one end of a soda can. Appropriately, the uncrushed-half popped upwards, an incline that spun the panicked passengers towards that exact collapse, but before they could leak out the doors or windows, the rest of the vehicle was caving in towards them. Rachel gradually laid flat the rest of her foot, the middle of her sole grinding the bus flatter and flatter, leaving only the frontward exit for escape. Even those that managed that far would only stumble into a hopeless shadow, unable to prevent the ceiling of a wrinkled sole from planting itself over top of them.
“Ohh,” Rachel gasped, covering her mouth -- a slither of embarrassment, emphasized by the widening of her eyes. She lifted her foot almost as slowly, bending it out of the way so she could see the results. The crowds nearby screamed at the horrific scene, but Rachel saw a wonderful painting of her own creation; in the footprint she made was the crumpled remains of a bus and the red color of its travelers. “Yes,” she pumped, “perfect…! Oh my god,” she laughed, glaring down at another bus farther up, “you’re next~”
The subsequent vehicle had only the time of one step to act. Rather than try to speed forward through the traffic, the driver abandoned the bus entirely, charging out the door much like his passengers. After having witnessed that example of her power, nearly all drivers on the road were leaving their vehicles and fleeing on foot, but the street was far too congested, and Rachel was far too big to escape from. Swifter than before, she stomped down on the bus, crushing it flat alongside the cars adjacent to it. A deeper crater was formed by the placement of her foot, a pit that caved into the underground subway systems, leaving behind broken shreds of the metal and pavement that had been there. Rachel admired her results, a content smile contrasting the horror held below, but so soon was she continuing her parade downtown, happily picking out targets with every footfall...