Twinkle

By VivettaVenray

(WARNING: Contains clean sweat, among other things.)

(NOTE: As a heads-up so-to-speak, this story has a bit less editing than my usual works [which aren't exactly heavily edited either perhaps.])

--------------

Chapter 1: Socks Go Off

It had been a long day of lectures at Momo University. It was the kind of day where classes were back to back sparing only a 45 minute break for lunch and less than half that between courses otherwise. Those scant latter chunks of time hardly enough to sit outside the classroom door and breathe while noise from whatever’s in the room currently, if anything, drifts muffled through the walls.

A long day of walking, loafers clacking against the floor, black socks brushing against the skin from the toes to the shins. A day where a young woman shifted her feet, time to time at her desks, as she pretended to be interested in a boring lecture: as she pretended to not already have mastered the boring material on the first day of classes if not earlier, let alone weeks into the spring semester.

It was boring, yes, but she was not bored. Far from it. Etsu knew how to keep herself entertained. Every shift of her feet in class or step while walking between destinations proved quite the show for her. Every careless curl of her toes jostled galaxies. Every iota of heat that emanated from her feet sweltered universes. Every minute bit of moisture from her body, seeping into the warp and weft of the black fabriced socks, brought water to desolate desert worlds while flooding others.

So, it was with a coy smirk on her face that Etsu walked into her dorm room once her day’s schedule of classes was done. Hands-free, the young woman slipped off her brown loafers with a bit of pressure from one foot’s toe region to the other’s heel, repeated twice.

Etsu splurged on a single dorm room, and the other women on her floor were away for now. Etsu’s neighbors were gone, around campus or off and occupying themselves for just as much time as Etsu desired and all for reasons they thought were their own: having to stay after class to help a professor, a call from an injured boyfriend, or even just a sudden urge to go off campus for french fries were all some examples.

Etsu moved to her bed, sitting her black-skirted bottom down on its cushioned surface. She brushed a hand through her purple hair, moving it behind the shoulder and white collar of her black college school outfit. She didn’t have to wear such a comparatively stuffy garb now or in general, but she immuned herself to any displeasure of the more starchy parts of the outfit and, well, she thought it was cute. Plus, school spirit and all.

Her mind, expansive as it could be, didn’t dwell so much on her attire overall but rather two parts of it: her comfy black socks. She was eager to inspect the outcome that such a busy lecture-filled day had on them and what was inside.

First, though, she slipped her foot under the bed and, with the toe of that foot, slid out her gym bag. Her volley ball club was meeting soon, so that meant she’d have to change.

That done, Etsu bent her right leg up and grasped at the toe of the sock. Immediately, from her pinching grip, she sensed the extinguishment of sextillions of lives and hundreds of universes. Immediately after, she brought them back, and protected them from the crushing cosmological pressure the pinch of the fabric had exerted.

Slowly, Etsu tugged. The sock, loosened from a day’s casual exertions, slid down from her foot with ease. The universes stuck in the fabric jostled; many were ground against her heel as the fabric slid by. Etsu’s angle of tugging wasn’t exactly even, but rather pointing towards the top of the foot a bit, resulting in some extra pressure of the sock’s interior towards her sole.

Entire universes, woven into the black sock by her will, were pressed and smeared against her flesh through the process. Not most of them: only a scant few really, as most universes were a bit too deep into the fabric to have the privilege of touching the young woman’s skin.

Not that it mattered though. All the universes that were or would’ve been broken as the sock slid off were reverted or protected, once again, by Etsu’s will. Just before the sock slipped off, she curled her toes, making a game of fighting the tug of her sock against the grip of her toes. An unstoppable tug versus an insurmountable grip. A stalemate resulted, naturally. In the heat and pressure at that curl of her toes the universes within the fabric there erupted, only to have their matter compressed to start a big bang, from which they erupted again, evolved, and more all in the span of a few seconds and all for Etsu’s entertainment.

Alas, she grew bored of that in time, and eventually tugged the sock free. Etsu’s bare right foot was finally exposed to the fresh air-conditioned air of her dorm. As soon as she felt the cooler air against her skin there, she let out a satisfied.

“Aaaah~”

She wiggled the toes that had shred universes moments earlier, working that cleaner, fresher air in the space between her toes some. Her foot still radiated heat however, with enough of it reaching the nearby, now removed sock held in her hand hanging limp near the ped’s side. The skin was certainly a bit moist there too. She allowed herself to sweat, though not smell the least bit ‘sweaty’. She didn’t sweat enough for her foot to be slick or anything, but there was the occasional sparkle where the LED lights of her room highlighted the bits of moisture here and there on the foot’s surface.

Etsu didn’t distract herself with her foot for long though. She intimately knew every molecule of her body after all. So, soon, after a quick glance she, instead, held up the recently removed sock to her face. Holding it by the cuff, she took in the sights, sounds, and every other sensation that could be intercepted to the going-ons of the black foot-garb.

The college student pierced the black fabric with her amber gaze. She saw entire planets and star-spanning empires going about their daily business, having recovered from the calamity she had inflicted earlier. She saw the rise and fall of many more worlds from the recently big-banged universes prior. Thousands upon thousands years unfolded to her in mere seconds.

Indeed, she had dilated time for the sock-dwellers during their stay in the sock. When she put the garbs on this morning, the universes within had just barely big-banged. Now, she could see how the sweat she exuded during the day brought life to worlds that were but barren wastelands in the morning. She peered through time itself, into the past, to take in every state of the space stuff from then till the present. She could see how the casual heat her foot had exuded sent some stars super-nova between class periods, while at other times it gave stars just enough heat to proceed to stages of size and radiance where they could support life.

For many other worlds, the heat she radiated from her foot, to them, simply made their planets tropical. In fact, the vast, vast majority of life-supporting worlds were tropical simply from the ambient heat and humidity of her foot. The only ones that weren’t were advanced societies who had developed various forms of planet-covering climate control and air conditioning and, of course, those who abandoned their worlds entirely in artificial constructs that sailed through the stars. Alas, they did not know that in that process they were drifting, merely, between two or more threads of a young college student’s socks.

The most advanced civilizations had conquered their universes entirely. They were confident they explored and dominated all of creation but, in fact, they hadn’t even bridged the distance a width of Etsu’s pinky toe. For all their ‘progress’ and ‘conquest’ over their universe, they had no idea the true and diminutive extent of their travels and the true worth of their achievements.

Etsu was about to change that. It was time for them to properly meet her. Smiling, with a blink, Etsu un-dilated time for the many universes dwelling inside the loose sock. She then spoke to them, both aloud and in their minds. Her voice rattled their bodies with its power, but she stopped it from dusting them or any of their makes to atoms.

“Konnichiwa miiiii-naaaaaaaaa-saaaa-nnnn”~”, she said. With the utterance, she imparted to them understanding of her language; the words of which ripped between the speck-sized stars.

She drank in their responses: every single one. The individual’s, those sent in panic hurries via advanced interstellar messaging equipment: all of it. The stew of responses was made of mostly confusion, with some spices of reverence from the many civilizations who ascribed divine purpose to the sudden humidification of their worlds in ages past. Inter-planetary and inter-galactic wars were momentarily halted at the cosmos-wracking utterance.

“I hope you are all doing well! Seems you developed quite nicely of the course of a day, kehehehe.”

Confusion kept rippling through the multitude of sapient beings within the sock. Etsu didn’t normally like to read minds, but she made an exception here. They were so small, so fragile, that the thought of treating them highly enough to respect their private thoughts was out of the question. That wasn’t even mentioning the practicalities of the matter but, those aside, Etsu imagined a normal sized, mundane person wouldn’t be able to think of these shrunken sapients as people. So, why should an extraordinary young woman like herself deign to?

“Ah, keheh, of course you don’t fully understand yet. How could you, without my help. Let me open your minds a bit, just a tad.”

With her words, it was done. All those many sextillions of minds across thousands of universes within her sock saw the situation from a new and changing perspective. The sights and sounds didn’t replace their own, but were layered on-top their normal senses. It was a peculiar thing for many of the lesser minds to process: like the lowly human-like races many of the sock-kept universes had evolved. However, Etsu had them covered. She temporarily advanced their minds enough to withstand the new layers of sensory information without breaking down, yet not so much that the experience was pleasant.

Every single being on every planet in every universe got their own unique view at first. It started with a view above their heads, zooming out to show their town or city, then their country then continent, then the planet and so on, zooming out faster and faster till they could see their star one moment and their entire galaxy the next second. From there it zoomed out and out till the blackness of space was replaced with towering, alien spirals of black that wasn’t quite as dark. From there, with a bit more zooming out, any tailor could recognize the pattern of warp and weft. A bit longer and people knew it was a sock. The view settled to just a few inches beyond the sock, centered around where their particular universe would be, and behind the garment was Etsu’s smiling, smug, visage.

Fear, an always present sensation among many since her voice rung out, quickly subsumed much of the remaining confusion as it percolated in the minds of many and more.

“Do you get it now?”, said Etsu.

Holding the sock by its cuff, she gave the garment a bit of a wiggle, and let the vibrations from that reach all the universes and those within. Dampening it with her unfathomable powers, it still reached the masses as quakes. No one died from it all for long, though, as she put the pieces back faster than any mind but her own could process.

“This entire time, your entire lives, have been spent in my sock. Not floating around but actually *in* the very fabric of it, between the weavings.”

She giggled.

“All those tropical planets you have, or left ‘years’ ago, were like that cause of how close they were to my body. Every rainfall you’ve had was probably, in one way or another, a consequence of a single drop of my sweat, every foggy day in part due to humidity from my body. Every earthquake could’ve been just the dampened experience of my steps, the reverberations of which shattered universes without your notice! Maybe yours one was of them, dozens of times perhaps~”

She laughed again, as more waves of existential horror and dread spread through the universes in that loosely held limp sock.

“Oh, I of course restored everything each time. I wouldn’t want you to have all died on the way to my first class of the day after all. Then I wouldn’t have anything to entertain myself with. That’s what you were, all of you were, every single universe here was my entertainment for the day. Couldn’t have that die off so soon.”

She smirked.

“Now though... now it’s a different story.”

Etsu set that sock aside on the bed, making sure not to damage the universes in the process. Then, the college student lifted her other foot, the left, up and quickly slid that sock off. This time, she undialated time for the universes in that sock right away. Not wanting to explain herself so slowly again, she just filled in their minds with the new zooming perspective that ended on a full view of her sliding the sock they were in, off.

To save even more time explaining she also just filled in their minds on the events of the day from a perspective not too dissimilar to hers. They were filled with the knowledge of millions and millions of years, before the time of all but the immortal species which had come to be within the sock. Every person of every sapient race was flooded with the utter banality that their universe’s evolution was associated with. They were forced to assimilate the true notion that their entire development, extinguishment, resurgence and so on all took place in a worn sock, and all over a time-span not even a day.

Etsu held that sock up a fair distance from her face, then reached for the other on her bed. She moved the two close together, letting her sigh roil over them as her other foot was now free and enjoying the breath of fresher air with its sister ped.

“I’d say I can only imagine how humiliated you must be, but I don’t need to imagine it. I know it. I know every atom’s placement in your little worlds and bodies and, with a thought, I can let them all fade away. This kind of thing isn’t natural you know. One thought and your cosmos won’t be protected from the laws of physics. Shrunken so small, you’d destabilize in seconds. Some might over heat, others might cool to ice real fast. I could just do that too, simulate the natural death of a universe by letting all the heat die out. But...”

She giggled.

“That’s boring! Doesn’t that sound boring? Do you really want to go through billions of years--to you--just to experience the heat-death of the universe? Even if it’s just seconds to me, that seems so lame~”

She grinned. There were a lot of thoughts to take in. Most were centered around pleas and begs to not die. That amused her greatly. The servile prayers were a nice touch too when they showed up on the order of sextillions.

“Aww don’t be sad. You lived longer than a lot of universes I’ve played with. This is a much better end than many get, trust me. I have no reason to lie when I hold your lives in my hands.”

She wiggled the socks some.

“But, I’m bored with you. We’ve had enough fun together. Spent enough time. The difference between toys and clutter is time. I don’t want any useless dust or lint ruining my perfectly good socks. So, it’s time for you to go out, and what better way than with a bang!”

Etsu grinned, squinting with delight. Inside her socks, perceived with ease by her, every star in the universes began to vibrate. Their luminescences surged. Every star started to erupt all at once. Black holes, collapsed stars, included as well in displays that would perplex and astonish any physicist. The light and heat from the septillions of super-novas spread well beyond it had any right to. Every star kept glowing, its eruptive shockwaves growing, until an entire shrunken universe was consumed.

Great star spanning empires and humble towns-bounded civilizations alike were immolated in a flashes of searing light. There was no escape. The pain was beyond compare yet mercifully brief given the sheer speed of the cosmological collapses.

All of it went on in her socks, one similar end for every universe she had stored there. Not even a single mote of space dust was left. All was released as energy. She had to unmake some matter herself to do so though, as otherwise the remnants of burst stars would be scattered among the fabric of her socks once every flicker of life was gone. Alluring as that idea could be, cleanliness did come first here to her.

With her socks now ‘clean’ of the existences once dwelling in them, back to normal garbs, Etsu tugged back on the toe regions of the pair. Her thumb and index pinched the cuffs, then she shot them to the other side of her room like a sling.

She giggled, looking at them laying there a moment before bringing her gaze down towards her feet as they hung off the side of her bed. She curled her toes slightly.

“Not too much time out for you two.”, she said, giggling at her feet.

“Volley ball practice is next after all. Let’s get my gym socks on while you’re both still warm. It’ll make the next entertainment all the more fun~”