Anabela Doll was a diva on her home planet, and yet on Earth she was completely unknown.

It took a single footstep to change that forever; one that flattened a couple of small towns under the platform of her white sandals.

The woman looked around with satisfaction. She had asked her agent to find her a remote, peripheral planet where she could relax away from the paparazzi and the crazed fans. And this place seemed as quiet as it could get.

The flat, green and brownish moss on the ground did look a bit dull, but Anabella knew she couldn’t be too fussy. Her agent had to work really hard – or so she had been swearing - to find a suitable place on sale, in an era where most of the known universe had already been privatized and closed down.

Besides, the blue pools of water just a few steps away appeared nice enough for a quick bath, and while the territory itself was uninspiring, it was also uniform enough for Anabella to spread her towel on.

And the local sun was high in the sky, gracing her vitamin-D-deprived skin with its warm beams.

Anabella sighed with relief, unaware that a plane had just crashed on the back of her skirt. The explosion was so minuscule that she hadn’t even felt the burn through the fabric, although a tiny brown burnt mark would be the permanent graveyard of the hundreds of passengers unlucky enough to be in the trajectory of the biggest butt in the entire galaxy.

She eyed the South, with its nice access to the water, the perfect place to set down her towel and relax.

No one could bother her here – it was an empty planet just like she had asked her agent for.

Wasn’t it?

If her landing had revealed the previously isolated population its true spot in the hierarchy of the universe, the following footsteps were not as historical, but even more destructive.

As she walked, the local geography was reshaped. Anabella’s right foot came down, destroying a natural park; thousands of trees nothing but irrelevant, bright green moss under her sole. With the heel of her left foot, she altered the path of the biggest river in the region, and under the toe section a village disappeared.

Each step forever imprinted the shape of the designer sandal's soles on the world. To Anabella, it was just like stepping into a remote country field. Dazed from the intergalactic trip, the woman hadn't yet considered the true nature of the world around her.

She swept the clouds away with the palm of her hand, watched her toes going head-to-head with the mountain peaks, and with a peaceful yawn, she averted her eyes from the first major city having to face the direct consequences of her passage.

A hundred thousand people looked up in disbelief. The fact that a plastic beach sandal was going to step on them, turning the downtown of their city into nothing but flattened debris was so surreal that it effectively broke their minds.

And while some spent their last waking seconds screaming their lungs out, others stood still with the same peaceful resignation of a wild animal that had just lost the race against their hunter and knew that struggling would be useless.

Anabella barely noticed the crunch.

The young woman had her eyes set on the coast. Her steps were lazy but catastrophic, and billions of people were watching on live TV, incredulous as they saw satellite images of a world reshaped by a creature who may as well be called a god.

No man-made structure could resist her stride. Just the platform of her shoes was hundreds of feet tall, only from the mountains or airplanes humans could hope to see the toenails elegantly painted in white.

And alongside the common people, world leaders watched in horror, their illusion of power shattered like the buildings Anabella Doll was crunching like leaves. No one on the planet knew how to deal with such a situation. No one was prepared to deal with a being so large it could wipe out humanity on its own. Were they supposed to send in the military? Should someone attempt to contact her?

Her appearance, after all, was uncannily familiar. A young woman that one could see at any beach, wearing a short skirt, a bikini top, sandals, and a straw hat to protect her from the sun. Her looks were so ordinary that it made the scene appear only more grotesque. Had the planet been ravaged by an abominable Lovecraftian deity, or an army of alien super-soldiers equipped with hyper-technological armor and weapons, it would almost have been more acceptable.

But, this?

Humanity being wiped out by your lovely next-door neighbor? The cute girl you would see walking her dog down the street or browsing the health section of the local grocery store?

It didn’t make any sense at all.

Not that it mattered to those who ended up underfoot. First came the tremors, alerting the unlucky population that the alien girl was coming. Then came her miles long shadow, hiding the sun behind the slender and toned feminine silhouette. And then came down the foot.

Hiding would be fruitless for no bunker could survive her shoes. Escaping more so – she could cover more ground in a few footsteps than the puny humans could in hours. All that people could do, no matter their social status, bank account, or connections, was to watch the scene unfold.

Millions were now holding their breath as Anabella walked toward the biggest city in the region. Big was, of course, a relative word for a grey patch that the pop singer could level with a few careful footsteps. But compared to everything else that she had yet stepped on, the city appeared remarkable, with a few skyscrapers and landmarks even daring to match the height of her sandal platform.

The peculiar feeling of the suburbs crunching underfoot and the mosaic-like shapes on the ground alerted Anabella, who couldn’t help but squint her eyes as she looked at the scene by her feet.

Around her toes, the destruction she had caused had created little puffs of smoke. And as soon as she squatted down to survey the surrounding area, her brow furrowed into a skeptical and uneasy glare.

“Huh?”

A shiver ran down Anabella’s spine as she recognized a railway narrower than her pinkie, which she had torn apart with her former footstep. Next to it, a highway not wider than the straps of her bikini top, in the middle of which she spotted minuscule, barely visible colorful dots...

And then, all around her, her feet currently covering multiple city blocks at once. One by one she finally recognized everything, albeit in disbelief at how minuscule everything was: microscopic buildings, streets, and trees making up a city level with her feet.

Anabella gasped, her brown eyes immobilized into a deadpan stare. She was currently stepping on hundreds, no, thousands of people. Microscopic people so small she couldn’t even see.

Her hand went to her bag, from which she picked up a device much like a smartphone. Using its built-in apps, she zoomed in and magnified the sight of the ground, and so everything became clear. The devastation where she had walked, the fires spreading through the city, the ongoing terror of the locals. People identical to her kind, only very much smaller. People the size of bugs, no, even smaller than that; germs, and despite that, able to organize, think, and build.

She marveled as she saw one single strand of her hair which had fallen down and was currently lying limp across half the city, splitting neighborhoods in two halves. Then her phone moved to the area around her feet, where she recognized her own sandals, their white platform dirty with the scraps of thousands of buildings. Only her big toe could cover dozens of houses in one single twirl. The difference in scale was insane.

The young woman sighed and closed the camera app, quickly fed up with the grotesque show. She still kept the phone around for she had an important call to make.

The city trembled as the voice of the alien echoed through the entire region.

“Rory? What the hell?”

*

Aurora couldn’t help but sigh. She had been dreading this moment – the moment when the spoiled princess would call and complain.

She knew the moment would come, although in her wishful thinking she had hoped that maybe Anabela wouldn’t care. That she wouldn’t notice. Or that she would even love it.

But that was not the case. Anabela was mad, and as her agent, she was the one who was obviously at fault.

“Rory, what the hell? Is this what you call a desert planet? A place where a girl can relax in peace? Do you know what I just stepped on? A fucking miniature metropolis!”

Aurora tried hard not to sigh, but she cringed. She imagined the bratty celebrity’s face, brimming with righteous fury, and was glad that she only had to hear her irate voice through the phone speaker, half a universe separating her from the rage of the indignant girl.

“Ana, relax,” she said, trying to sound as soothing as possible. “It’s fine.”

“It’s fine?” Anabela asked. “Rory, do you realize I must have stepped on, like, thousands of people? And there’s millions of them watching me right now, like… how can I ever relax in here?”

“Well,” Aurora said. “I realize that this is not ideal. But do you have any idea how hard it is to find a suitable planet that is for sale, has a breathable atmosphere, and is completely uninhabited? Because I will tell you: it’s impossible!”

Anabela pouted. “But…”

“This is the best I could do,” Aurora said. “And if you don’t like it, well, we can always get a refund, but if you want to hear my opinion… just stay put. Enjoy yourself. It’s not like these germ-like people can be much of a nuisance to you.”

“But, Rory!” Anabela said. “This is going to be a PR disaster. The media will…”

The young woman was soon interrupted by her agent. “No one will know.”

“Huh?”

“The planet is completely isolated. I’ve checked not once but several times. And they have no kind of communication whatsoever with any other civilization.”

“Really?” Anabela asked. “So they can’t, like, tell anyone about this?”

“No soul outside their planet will know, Ana. Except for you and me."

Anabela bit her lip and smirked at the ground. “Why didn’t you tell me so from the beginning?”

Good question, Aurora thought. Perhaps it would have saved her a headache.

“But,” Anabela asked, appearing suddenly concerned. “Won’t the teeny people try to attack me and stuff? Like, bomb me or something? They can’t be too happy about me being here, after all.”

“Don’t worry about that either,” Aurora said. “The spaceship’s defense system will take care of that. Their minuscule bombs and planes will be pulverized like flies.”

“Is that so?” Anabela asked, returning to smile. “Good to know. Thanks, Rory.”

“Glad to have helped,” the woman said, sighing as Anabela finally put the call down.

All is well that ends well, Aurora told herself. Well, except for those little, mite-like people. She did feel bad for them. She wasn’t a bad person. But she had to keep Anabela happy if she wanted to keep her job. She couldn’t stress about the fact that her client was going to crush their minuscule world to dust. Life, she told herself, was already difficult enough without having to care about those microscopic, insignificant civilizations.

Part II

Anabela grinned as she eyed the little city.

“I’ll let you know that I legally own this place,” she smugly boasted. “And that means all of this is mine to do whatever I please.”

With her first step, as if to take revenge for the anxiety that the locals had been indirectly causing her, she stepped directly into the city center, pulverizing a dense cluster of buildings.

“Sorry for your teeny city…” the woman chirped, her upbeat tone suggesting she wasn’t all that saddened by the sudden destruction of dozens of structures, helpless against the thick sole of her sandal. “Well maybe you can rebuild once I’m gone… I plan to be back here a lot though, so you’ll have to work fast…”

One more foot was raised, the microscopic population gazing up in terror as the sole onto which the unrecognizable remains of the next neighborhood over were plastered swelled up in the sky.

“I mean, you should be happy that you get my... signature footprints. I’m real famous where I come from, don’t you know?” Anabela giggled. “A massive star! It’s a shame you never got to know me before today…”

It only took her a few more steps to get out of the sprawling metropolis, each step leaving behind a trail of destruction.

Knowing what this world was truly like, the girl couldn’t help but smirk. “Gee, to think I used to worry about these uncivilized microbes…” She eyed lakes that she could barely dip her feet into, mountain ranges that didn’t reach to her shins, and stadiums no larger than her big toe that could still seat tens of thousands of spectators. But none of that even looked real under the plain sight of the girl; all of that was nothing but an indistinct carpet that waited for nothing else but to be stepped upon.

And then she finally reached the coast. Burying multiple towns under her towel, she created a new and gigantic flattened desert, which she further compressed under the weight of her body. Her sweaty bikini top came down and covered a nearby hill. Then, her giant and juicy butt crashed and caused an earthquake that razed what was left of the surrounding landscape.

Here, without indiscreet eyes watching – at least none that actually mattered to her, Anabela could finally sunbathe nude. And as for the local population, they could feast their eyes on the satellite views all they wanted. She did not mind offering the nice show in exchange for the hospitality.

The girl kicked her sandals away, resting her feet on the nearby towns. Thousands disappeared, becoming mush under her long, slender toes and tan sole. Anabela’s skin pasted it all together as if it were sand.

Then, she put all of her weight on the feeble ground of this tiny, wretched planet, her enviable silhouette effortlessly blending with the local geography. Flying passengers looked down from their windows to see the spectacle of the naked woman sunbathing. They admired the tan lines in tits as big as cities, and the wild triangular jungle of her dark, trimmed bush.

Their entire plane would have only been a speck on her nipple, and they… they would have been invisible germs.

Anabella’s face was calm and blissful – on this faraway planet she had finally found relaxation. Her spaceship quietly shot down all hostile planes and missiles as easily as a bottle of insecticide would take care of a bug nest.

She sighed with bliss, dipping her feet in the shallow water. She was rich and famous on her home planet, but here she finally tasted real power - the power of the gods.

Yes, she would come back here often. And as for her agent, she probably deserved a heartfelt thank you. Maybe she could even get her a mountain or a tiny skyscraper as a souvenir – if only she found a way to collect them unscathed.

For the time being, Anabela closed her eyes and enjoyed the sunlight.