After Tanya and Viktoriya’s afternoon of “fun” upon their discovery of what had appeared in their apartment, Tanya spent the night wondering when exactly those micro-sized cities had appeared and, more importantly, if they were the only ones who had those appear in their home, or if other students had experienced the same thing….

BEEP, BEEP, BEEP

Aqua rustled in her bed. Groaning, she hugged her pillow and brought the covers closer to her face, covering her shoulders.

BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP

“Hnng…”  The goddess brought her knees to her chest as the noise of the alarm clock pierced her ears, hoping that somehow it’d turn back off on it’s own and she’d be able to keep sleeping.

BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP

The rate of the beeps accelerated, much to Aqua’s dismay. She pressed her eyelids tighter, but the sunshine coming through her window on the other side of her small bedroom reminded her that she was likely not going to be able to just ignore the noise.

The beeping continued. Aqua’s fists clenched as she pressed against herself harder, until she couldn’t hold her rage in at the device anymore.

BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPB-  Her fist shot off her body with the fury of a god, coming down onto the alarm clock’s snooze button and shutting it up, rattling its insides.  “Hmph.” Having dealt with the issue, she went back to sleep, happy with her triumph. 

As she went back to a more relaxed position, Aqua’s mind drifted back to sleep. Enough so that she was nearly unconscious when she overheard the door of her bedroom open, followed by the sound of slipper-covered footsteps walking closer to her. Aqua opened her eyes slightly. seeing the shape of the pinkish-red pajamas of her roommate.  “M-Megumin! What are you-” Leaning down, Megumin yanked the cord of the digital alarm clock, its numbers quickly turning into 8’s before vanishing.

 “We go over this every weekend, Aqua. It’s Saturday.” The tired Megumin said dryly. “You can change it to only go off on weekdays.” “W-well I shouldn’t! The damned thing rudely wakes me up every day already! I don’t owe it anything! I-”  The door to the bedroom shut as Megumin walked back out. “Hmph…” Aqua rubbed her eye as she sat up. Between the alarm clock and Megumin, she now knew she wasn’t going to be able to fall back asleep. Her bare feet dangled close to the floor, hovering over it, before finally touching down as Aqua stood up. “Huh?” Aqua suddenly felt something crunch underneath her sole. Something small, like stepping on a brittle pebble… “Ew, what was…” Aqua grabbed her foot and brought it to her face. Looking at her sole, she spotted a tiny grayish black spot under the ball of her foot. She touched it, dragging her finger slightly across the sole. Whatever that was, it crumbled easily, and spread slightly. “Megumin! Did you drag crumbs onto my bedroom?!”  “I haven’t had breakfast yet!”  Aqua pouted. Megumin could be difficult sometimes, especially with her constant denial of her godhood, not letting her realize that she should try her best to keep Aqua’s chambers pristine.

Not fully convinced with Megumin’s response, Aqua stood up once more. 

She swallowed, her dry throat tightening uncomfortably and making her cough slightly.

Remaining barefoot, she walked to the apartment’s kitchen, where Megumin was drinking a glass of milk, several chocolate chip cookies on a plate beside her.   

As she heard Aqua’s footsteps, Megumin hid the cookies slightly on instinct. “You’re not gonna go back to sleep?”  “Maybe later… right now I’m just going to drink some water and go to the bathroom” “I thought goddesses didn’t have to go to the bathroom.” Megumin snickered.

Aqua’s cheeks reddened slightly. “Wh-why aren’t YOU in bed? You usually sleep more than me!” “I would, but my bed has been itchy all night. There’s these weird gray spots all over, and now I feel like they’ve gotten to my clothes, too. I was gonna vacuum it later today.” As she filled a glass of water in the sink and drank, Aqua thought about what she had said. Gray spots…? Whatever those were, if Megumin had them on her bed during the night, maybe it was something else… “Are you sure you didn’t just eat cookies in bed again?” “What? No! …they didn’t feel the same.” She muttered quickly before taking a bite of one.  As Aqua walked to the bathroom, Megumin tasted her breakfast… there was something odd about the cookies. She looked over them. Maybe they were stale? The archmage grabbed a different cookie and split it in two. Nope, they felt the same. She then looked closer at them…

“Those tiny spots on the cookies… were they always there?” She squinted. It was hard to tell what was a small piece of a chocolate chip and what wasn’t. “Oh well.” Megumin tossed half of the cookie she broke into her mouth, chewing on it. While she swallowed, the toilet flushed.

 Aqua walked back to her bedroom, sitting on her bed. Not sure whether to go back to bed or not, she idly wiggled her toes.

…and once again felt that weird crumbling sensation.

“Ugh, what the-?” She looked at her foot again. Whatever those things were, she had definitely stepped on a few.

“What are these?!” Looking far closer into the thin gray dust that had formed between her toes, Aqua used her superior eyesight to see what exactly it was… “...?” Her eyes widened slightly, and squinted once again, to look even closer, her nose practically touching her sole. Whatever those stains were, they were formed of… complex, tiny shapes.  She saw tiny rectangles. Most gray, some of different colors. Small differently colored shapes that almost resembled cars. A tiny, white, long shape that looked like a worm at first, but upon closer inspection was formed of rectangular sections linked together.

Aqua got an idea of what this could be… but she figured that was almost impossible. Not even her, with her full powers, could do something like that… Then she saw something else. Something smaller than any other shapes. Something…. crawling. Crawling on the sole of her foot, struggling to move. In her shock, Aqua’s foot twiched, becoming slightly more vertical and causing the tiny figure to fall to her toes. Aqua’s vision hadn’t failed her… that thing wasn’t a bug. It was a human.

“Hey! Megumin!” Megumin heard the half-excited, half-confused voice of the self-proclaimed Goddess running quickly to her as she finished her “Breakfast”.

“Megumin, Megumin!” “...Yes?” Turning in her chair, she faced Aqua in confusion. Aqua being this excited means she had either found money or thought the burnt side of her toast was shaped like her. “Look!” In the tip of her finger, Megumin saw a small gray patch with some tiny bumps.

“...yes, I was supposed to clean today. No need to get sassy, I was gonna do it after this-” “No, no! Look… closer” Megumin’s face got closer to Aqua’s finger. From the valley within the fingertip, hundreds of people saw a crimson-red eyes take over their entire sky.  Megumin squinted, then reeled back slightly when she recognized what she was looking at.

“Are those…” “Yep.” Aqua reeled her hand back with triumph in her face, bringing it to her hip, grinding the city against the blue fiber of her shirt. “So those things in my cookies…” “Yep.” “And in my bed…” “Yep.” “...huh.”

Megumin barely had time to think about this as Aqua excitedly retreated to her room, happy to have been given some proper subjects for her worship.

The crimson demon, her feet dangling close to the floor, was about to say something to Aqua, but she couldn’t think of anything before the goddess shut the door to her room. 

 She looked to her side, to the table. When she focused on it, she could tell they were everywhere, some larger than others. Behind her glass of milk, she spotted a particularly large city, about half the size of a penny. 

She brought her finger, slightly shaky, closer, but stopped herself before touching the city. The slight tingling she had been feeling definitely confirmed that there were people living in these cities, and it was much more obvious in this particularly bigger one.

Carefully, her fingertip came closer to the city, clipping the tallest building and causing it to topple. To her surprise, it felt… really good. 

A slight smirk appeared on her face. Her stomach rumbled, reminding her of the likely thousands of people currently waiting for their doom deep inside her. 

She stood up and walked to the living room area that shared a space with the kitchen. She spotted a small piece of paper with some nonsensical Aqua scribbles. Picking it up, she came back to the city, carefully nudging it forward as she stuck the piece of paper in front of it. Once the city was loose and on the piece of paper, she took it to her room.

Placing the city on her desk, Megumin grabbed her staff and pointed it at the city. “Attention. specks! You are on my domain and as such, I am free to use you as I please in my path to become the most powerful of all arch-wizards!”   

The people within the city, among the panic of not knowing where they were and being moved by a titanic being, barely processed what she had told them. Only some of them noticed her staff getting higher and higher up, and then closer to the city…

“Hya!” Megumin brought her left hand to her face to strike a pose as her staff descended on the city, obliterating it in a moment. “Woah…” Megumin was shocked with the ease with which she used her spell catalyst itself to end an entire settlement.

Seeing the dark gray stain left behind, she started to get ideas for more ways to destroy even more cities… Walking to her desk, she found a particularly small city, one that looked like a natural black spot in the wood at first. 

“Hm… you must be pretty light…” She leaned closer to the city, until her face was right above it. The confused and panicked citizens desperately attempted to flee their concrete prison, despite the large fall between the edges of the city, seemingly ripped off the earth, and the vast dune-like expanse of the wooden desk. But no matter how fast they ran, not a single one of them escaped what Megumin had in mind next.

Bringing her nose closer to the city, Megumin held her breath for a couple of seconds, before taking in a deep breath. Immediately, a warm hurricane-like wind swooped every single person up into the sky and towards the twin pitch black holes in the sky that were Megumin’s nostrils. The air turned stale as they went into her nose: Some ended up stuck among her nose hairs while others went deeper inside. sticking to the back of her tongue or close to her lungs, insignificant enough that they didn’t even make her cough, while the luckier ones were exhaled right back out.

 Megumin looked back to the city.  “Woah, the floor and stuff is still there, but…” Pulling out her pinkish red phone, Megumin opened the camera app and zoomed in on the city to help her see it better. “But there’s nothing moving around anymore… Does that mean the only people left here are in the buildings?” Focused on looking at the screen, the archwizard loosened her grip on the smartphone, causing it to break loose and suddenly fall from her hands. “Whoops-” The phone fell right on the city, crushing it in a moment under the cute red silicone case.

“...” Silently, Megumin picked up her phone and put it back to her side.  With her eyes back to the table, she once again tried looking for more cities. But what first got her attention was something brighter: a black plastic wrapping with little red explosion illustrations on it, opened and empty. She casually picked the plastic up and scrunched it on her fist, not paying attention to the possibility of there being cities in the wrapper. But before throwing it away, she had an epiphany. She opened her now slightly sweaty palm and looked at the wrapping: It was her favorite candy that she had found in this new world and for a good, obvious reason: Pop rocks. 

Her eyes widened. She could finally obliterate whole cities with explosions… just not the same scale of explosions. Megumin walked back to the kitchen, finding Aqua there, seemingly looking for cities. She noticed that she was walking… oddly.  With her knees close to each other, her thighs pressed together and legs trembling slightly, Aqua was looking downwards while facing away from Megumin.  Curious, Megumin tapped her on the shoulder. She heard the sound of elastic snapping, and a red-faced Aqua turned around to face her, with shocked eyes and a forced smile. “Oh, h-hey, Megumin! H-having fun?” “Yeah, I-” “Great! I’m… gonna go now…”

Aqua struggled to walk properly as she made her way to her door carefully, before closing it behind her, which was followed by Megumin hearing her jumping onto her bed and some strange muffled noise, likely from Aqua putting her head against her pillow. 

Rolling her eyes, she went to one of the cabinets under the sink: It held cleaning tools when they moved in, but she had quickly repurposed it into a convenient candy drawer. As she opened it, multicolored wrappers and tubes of various brands came to view. She grabbed a handful, and returned to her room.    

Setting her candy on the desk with determination, Megumin grabbed her nearby chair and dragged it to her. She noticed quite a collection of cities. “Oh! Hm, maybe I should…” She looked around her room. At a glance, she could see multiple cities just on the floor, some of them not accidentally stepped on yet. “You know, I think I’m good.” She brought the chair behind herself, and several hundreds of thousands of people suddenly saw the small but shapely behind of the young sorcerer, covered in the thin pink pants of her underwear, coming closer and closer to them, becoming their entire sky, until it finally descended upon them… Megumin landed firmly on her chair, and pushed herself forward with her legs, getting closer to the table. She rummaged through the pile of candy and spotted a bag of pop rocks. “Explosive candy… truly this world is wonderful.” She opened the package, some of the candy spilling out. Tilting the container on her hand, she grabbed a small handful of them on her left palm, then placed the wrapper back into place as she went to look for another city on the table. 

It didn’t take long for her to spot another gray patch with oddly symmetrical bumps on the wooden surface of the table. This city was surprisingly large in surface area, but with very small people nonetheless. It was the size of a coffee stain, having hidden under the curve of a piece of paper. “Ah, there you are~” She brought her right hand to the city, fingers wiggling as if teasing the city itself, before stopping. “Wait, how do I…” She attempted to pinch some of the city, but instead her thumb and index razed some of the city, leaving dusty debris on her fingertips. She tried to lift the whole thing up by grabbing it from underneath, but it was far too thin, instead partially splitting with the slight nudge of her pinky’s nail. “Ugh. Maybe I should just…”  Just like the denizens of the city that was inhaled by the crimson demon, the people that just witnessed two colossal pillars swiftly take out part of the city, and saw huge fissures cover the city and collapse buildings with a slight nudge, saw the otherwise cute face of the colossal Megumin approaching them. Except instead of her nose, it was her lips that got closer…

“Ahh~” Megumin opened her mouth. She was already salivating from having smelled the pop rocks, and as soon as her mouth was opened up, the city was treated to several droplets of saliva that flooded whole houses. The pink muscle approached them, her breath washing over the city and knocking people over as the air got stuffier and warmer, until finally the tongue made contact.

In one fell swoop, Megumin licked up the entire civilization, the stickiness of her tongue allowing most of the people to stick to the surface of her tongue rather than get crushed.

Her tongue retracted back into her mouth, her lips sealing shut. Despite the situation, an eerie quiet washed over the city, only interrupted by the sound of small saliva bubbles shifting and breaking and the distant heartbeat and other bodily sounds that came from beyond her throat…  Then the sky opened up again. The terrified citizens saw Megumin’s left hand, filled with small red pieces of candy. She tilted her hand, and the avalanche of candy wreaked havoc on the stranded people, smashing them further against her tongue or swooping them away as they stuck to the squishy candy, getting closer to her throat…

But that wasn’t all. The candy stayed relatively dry for a few seconds as it pooled up around the city’s debris. But as Megumin closed her lips again, silence came back to her maw but not for too long.

Suddenly, a massive popping sound caused everyone’s ears to ring, obliterating everything around it. Followed by another, and another. To the people lucky enough to have either bounced away or crawled away from the middle of her tongue, or ended up stuck to the inside of her cheeks or around her lips, it sounded like gunshots. To the people closest though, it sounded like artillery fire.

And just like artillery fire, it destroyed everything around it indiscriminately as the concentrated carbon dioxide burst out of each piece of candy.  Megumin brought her hands to her cheeks, closing her eyes and leaning back on her chair. The sensation was… amazing. Not just the “explosions” in her mouth and the sweetness of the candy, but the knowledge that these explosions were destroying an entire city within her mouth was irresistible to her. She felt like all her fantasies of power had culminated to this moment, as hundreds lost their lives to mere candy atop her small tongue.  Not being able to hold it in anymore, she wished the candy around in her mouth. The popping of the candy combined with the crumbling of what remained of the city was incredible. While she did this, Megumin absentmindedly licked her lips, sweeping up some people that had remained stuck, leaving some of those covered in sugar and stuck to her tongue stuck to it instead, and causing some to fall entirely off her mouth and to her shirt.  As she did this, her roommate was having her own fun in her bedroom…

 Aqua had managed to place dozens of cities’ worth of people carefully in a makeshift “temple” made out of a matchbox and a piece of bent cardboard that acted as a ramp inside and outside of it. 

As Megumin enjoyed her special candy, Aqua carefully balanced three more cities on top of a microscope slide that she had nabbed from the school’s lab. Placing the slide in front of the matchbox, Aqua pursed her lips and very gently blew on the city, causing just about everything not bolted to the ground to fly off the city in a gust of warm wind, and fall directly onto the matchbox. The shrunken people were glad that they were close to weightless as they fell several hundreds of feet from their perspective, only to fall on soft cardboard with a mild impact. They did, however, have the issue of motorcycles, small cars and other light objects raining down on the matchbox right along with them.

After many, many cities, Aqua was finally satisfied with her hoard: She had accumulated enough tiny people that they were fully visible without focusing on the box. Granted, it looked like an odd moving mass, but it was a success for her nonetheless.

Taking away the piece of cardboard, Aqua excitedly grabbed the box and placed it on her floor. She stood up to her full height, planting her feet on either side of the box. She inhaled as she started to think of what her speech should be, but quickly noticed that she wasn’t looking quite as “holy” as she wanted. Her long baggy blue pants and matching loose shirt, paired with bare feet and unkempt hair, wasn’t the look she wanted while addressing her new subjects. Turning right around, she quickly changed to the full view of everyone, letting them see her bare back and a glimpse of her chest as she put on her usual white shirt, and a generous view of her butt while she changed into her short skirt. After putting on her socks, boots, ribbon and headpiece, she turned back to the matchbox, this time planting either boot on each side of the box and giving the people inside a direct view up her skirt.  “Ahem… I am Aqua! Goddess of water! You have been sent here by my -admittedly incompetent- junior, who finally decided to do something right for once! As such, you will become my faithful, loyal worshippers and will pay attention to each command I give you! As a reward, you will all receive my blessing and- hey!”  With her magical vision, Aqua was capable of seeing each individual person in the matchbox if she tried, and that’s exactly what she was doing as she gave her passionate speech. But in the middle of it, she noticed a flaw with her plan: The cities weren’t all the same size and as a result, neither were the people inside. While they were generally doing a good job at staying close to the edges of the box and near people of equal or similar size, there were some outliers, and Aqua spotted one: A little girl, presumably from one of the bigger cities, was grabbing much tinier people by the handful and stuffing them in her pocket, accidentally crushing some under her black school shoes. “Stop that! You’re killing my worshippers!” Aqua pouted. She picked up a toothpick that she had been using to crush random cities out of boredom a moment ago, and brought it towards where the kid was. With a precise flick, she managed to send her towards where people of her size were. “Okay… with that dealt with…” Aqua tried to remember where she left off  “R-right! So, you will worship me voluntarily! To make sure that I only have the best of worshippers…” She picked up the thin piece of bent cardboard once more and placed it on the box, with the other end leading to a plastic bottle cap. “Those of you who do not want to worship me, go over the bridge and away from the church of Aqua!”  Upon these instructions, the panic of the alien situation everyone found themselves in was offset by confusion.  Some people decided to firmly stay- Specifically those that liked what they saw when Aqua changed herself and were wondering what else they were going to see if they stayed with her, while others stayed out of fear or simple confusion. Many people however, hesitantly got on the “bridge” and made their way to their new chamber: A ring-sized stadium with pale blue spikes decorating the multi-layered edges, at least from their perspective of the simple bottle cap.   Once it seemed that people had stopped moving, Aqua grabbed the bottle cap and placed it on her desk, placing a ruler on top of it to prevent anyone from climbing out, hard as that would be to accomplish. Her eyes then veered back down to the immediate surroundings of her “church”...

As she expected, hundreds of the tinies used the bridge opportunity to jump out of the matchbox, falling onto the floor and making a break for it as they ran straight for her door, under her bed or wherever else. They were far too small to make any real progress, though.

Smugly looking down, Aqua lifted her right boot. “And those of you who are trying to escape your goddess are nothing but dirt! Tiny worthless specks that stain my perfect room!” The blue sole of her boot loomed the faithless, allowing them to see the few cities Aqua had stepped on since she put them on, and all the normal dirt and debris from a frequently washed, but even more frequently worn boot. The sole seemingly expanded further and further as it got closer to the floor, until finally it made contact, instantly squishing hundreds of tinies and leaving others wedged into the tiny grooves and imperfections of her sole.

Aqua twisted her ankle, making sure to fully snuff out anything beneath her.

 “Now, with that done…” Aqua grabbed the bottlecap and the matchbox.

“Time for your worship~”

Back in the living room, Aqua placed both tiny containers on the table, and went towards the drawers, opening up a larger bottom drawer that had pots and pans when they moved in, but Aqua had repurposed into a booze drawer.

She pulled out a bottle of wine, casting a slight ice spell on her palm to cool it, and a glass.

She sat down on the couch, kicking her feet up and putting her boots next to the containers in the process. She reached for the bottlecap and placed it beside her thigh while she poured herself wine.

“Faithful worshippers!” Aqua spoke, not bothering to look at the matchbox. “You will now start serving me! You’re too tiny to bring me anything or do any physical labor, really…” Her left boot’s heel approached the matchbox, placing itself on top of one of the edges and pushing down slightly, tipping the box over.

“So you will compliment me and think of reasons why I’m your best choice for a Goddess to worship!” 

As Aqua said this and the tinies from the matchbox got their bearings, they went in many different directions. Some stood near her shoes, unsure of what to do and just worried to anger her if they stayed far away from her, or simply to admire the colossal looming soles, bigger than any mountain. Others attempted to escape once more with Aqua seemingly distracted by her wine, only to realize that she had laid a sort of sticky red tube along the edges of the table. A rare few though, saw this truly god-sized human and found no reason not to genuinely worship her as such, praying by her feet.

Meanwhile, Aqua swished the wine on her glass gently, allowing it to flow and give off that aroma that she had grown so accustomed to. The wines in this world were much smoother than the ones back in her old world…

But it was missing something. She looked at the bottlecap and smiled, sending shivers down the spines of many that knew what was coming.  With her index and thumb, Aqua grabbed the bottle cap and held it above the wine glass. “As for you… you still have an opportunity to repent, you know? Perhaps you’re not perfect worshippers -in fact you’re about as imperfect as it gets- but you can still serve me in other ways if you so choose~” She tilted the bottle cap slightly. A few people caught by surprise plummeted to the wine glass.

“Those of you that wish to still serve me in some way… jump in.” She grinned. “You have the opportunity to become part of something much, much better than yourselves…” 

To her delight, several people jumped in, whether out of fear of what she’s do to those that stayed behind, hope that they’d somehow be able to escape or deliriously thinking she would do anything to that wine glass other than drink it, several black specks descended off the plastic cap and onto the glass. Aqua let out a slight giggle. It wasn’t often that she got to act like the goddess she was.

Swirling the glass once more, she took a sip of the rich drink, letting it flow around her tongue along with the many tiny specks that floated around in it. After tasting it for a while, she swallowed, feeling the smooth rich liquid flowing down her throat and to her stomach…

“That’s nice…” Aqua closed her eyes for a moment. Her mind wandering to her regular followers for a moment, she looked at her table, and noticed she was leaving dirt on the part of the table that her boots were laying on. “Oops… I suppose my devout worshippers may be able to clean that” Aqua took off her boots, placed them beside her legs, and kept drinking.

After having a couple more glasses, “encouraging” those that didn’t hop off the bottle cap until it was empty, she turned her attention to her voluntary followers, for the perfect plan to see which ones truly were devoted.  “Ah, it seems you’re all at work worshipping me… But what’s this? Some of you seem to have tried to leave!” She teasingly looked at the red string that was lining the table: Red licorice candies that she had “borrowed” from Megumin’s candy and set up as makeshift fences while she looked for cities. And there were thousands upon thousands of people stuck to the edges and top in an attempt to climb away and escape, that ended up betrayed by the sugar in the candy.

Aqua’s boots left the table as she planted them on the ground while leaning in closer. As she did this, her thigh rubbed against the matchbox, moving it closer to the edge. She grabbed an end of  the red rope with her index and thumb, and dangled it in front of her face. Her mouth moved closer to the various stuck people. “You disgust me… no mere faithless people. Traitors who told me you would worship me, only to gain my trust for a moment and try to escape at the last moment…” As she finished the sentence, she left her mouth partially open, letting everyone hanging to that end of the rope see the slightly alcoholic cavern of a maw… “You don’t even deserve to be eaten by me” She walked to the candy drawer. “Maybe becoming part of a bratty explosion-obsessed kid is more fit for your end~” She took the open wrapper of the red licorice, and carefully stuffed the candy back into place, strategically placing the wrapper on top of the pile to attract Megumin’s attention. While she did this, the sound of cardboard bouncing off leather and hitting carpet were muffled by the crinkling of plastic.

“Now, for my proper worshippers-” As she walked back to the table, she saw her boots. Wanting to look as godly as possible, she made sure to put them on, sliding her white socked feet inside. “As you may have been able to tell, your next task is-” She looked at the table. There was nothing. She then turned, hesitantly, to the floor, right next to where her boots were. The matchbox was upturned, laying on the floor, with no tinies in sight.

 “...oops.”