Electric Slide

Chapter Three

The sun had gotten its shine on and it was well into the next day when Haile started to wake up. The standard process of the unencumbered and ‘no appointments or obligations today’ kind of person began to work its subroutines in Haile’s brain. Time to wake up. But I don’t want to. Maybe ten more minutes. Alright that’s over, time to go. But the bed feels so nice. It’s going to start getting too hot soon, the sun is shining on us. Throw off the blanket then. The bed's too comfortable. Alright this is starting to get silly. Okay, okay fine, just leave me alone I’m getting up. Look, I’ve got my hands moving.

All of her senses started coming back to her. The weak breeze coming from her HVAC, the warmth of the sun spilling out over and through the sheets that still lightly covered her body. The softness of the bedding that wrapped around her. A couple of tiny movements inside her mouth.

Her mouth, oh yeah. She did take in a few ‘for fun’ passengers last night, didn’t she? They appeared to still be alive, how incredible of them. She decided to lay there for a little bit just ‘listening’ to their movements with her nerves. They were mostly clustered around her front, right near the middle of her lips. Had any of them escaped in the night? She concentrated, trying to feel any little movements on her body. If they had, they had better have gotten far because when she moved, there were probably going to be a few red splats.

Haile parted her lips slightly and could feel their movements instantly charge towards her lips. Then she parted her teeth and opened her mouth, yawning as she did. She sucked in an overstuffed lung full of air that caused many of the tinies in her mouth to lose their purchase and whistle away down her throat and into her body, screaming as they went. Then she breathed out as she shut her mouth and licked her lips, dealing with the rest of the passengers. They were all gone, either deep inside her, far away, or little smears anywhere at all.

She had lazed around long enough, it was definitely time to get up. She didn’t have any pressing appointments, but she did have a few things she wanted to do back in that little town she found yesterday. She swirled her tongue around in her mouth and swallowed all the accumulated saliva. Time for breakfast and another adventure to finish up what she was doing yesterday.

Haile crawled out of bed and stretched before wandering over to her closet. This time she pulled out a blue t-shirt with horizontal white stripes that would cover her ribcage and her elbows, along with a pink knee length skirt, white undergarments and her favorite flowery socks. She deposited all of these things on her bathroom counter and shut her door.

After a quick inspection of the room she found it yet again empty. This was going on a record, nearly a whole two weeks since she last found an intruder in her personal space. Sure, people might think their entire home is personal space. But Haile was an exception. She loved the idea of her home being the home of hundreds, if not thousands of little people who had the run of the place. They could do what they wanted, go where they wanted, whatever. Even if that involved spying on her while she was changing, crawling on her while she was sleeping, or escaping out into the wider world.

She was going to be honest with herself, she didn’t really care about them. If they got in her way, she would usually step on them. Their body would crunch under her weight and splat all over her shoe, foot, sock, floor, etc. Then they would have to clean it up. If she ever had to clean it up, there would be hell to pay. She specifically never messed with anyone who was actively engaged in ‘earning their keep’ as she would say. One of the main ways people did that was by cleaning up the messes of one another. If someone went and got themselves smeared all over the hardwood floor, they would come out in twos or more and clean up the grotesque mess. She liked the arrangement, and it meant they could guarantee life for themselves.

She turned on the shower and stepped into it while she continued to think to herself. Another way little people could earn their keep is by sorting her belongings. Surprisingly, she ended up crushing a lot of people under foot, or under her body in her bed. These people always had clothes, as nudity was frowned upon by Haile unless she induced it personally. So clothing would be collected, cleaned, and stored in what Haile came up with as a clothing retail store. In the corner of her living room she had what could be called a strip mall with things for tiny people.

The mall contained a clothing store that housed all the outfits and serviceable items of clothing people could wear from shoes to shirts, pants, skirts and even a few dresses. Another store housed household belongings, utensils, furniture, entertainment devices, games, etc. Haile brought home a lot of souvenirs from the little world and she would usually leave them in front of the mall to be sorted and distributed amongst her population.

Life wasn’t bad in Haile’s home. The only real danger was Haile herself. If you weren’t actively, visibly working, such as sorting, cleaning, or something similar, you were prey. If Haile wanted something to eat, she just walked around her home until she found someone, and ate them. On the spot. It was just the way things were there. Haile loved hunting but she didn’t always feel like going out to eat. So she just ate in. Of course if she didn’t even feel like hunting she had boxes of people stored in her cabinets. Some of these boxes could be easily broken into and the prisoners saved, but others were inescapable for those specifically dire moments of hunger Haile experienced.

Then there were the city boxes. These were very special. Haile had built them herself. Inside there was an entire section of a city, built and designed by Haile. They usually contained buildings, possibly a park, a light source, and food and water. In them there would be hundreds if not thousands of tinies, the smallest of the small. If Haile could hold someone in her hand with their head and feet sticking out of her fist, then the tiniest of tinies could fit into their hand the same way. They tasted different, and Haile loved them almost as much.

Haile let the water run over her naked body and turned gently in the warm spray. It relaxed her muscles and cleared her sinuses as she just relaxed in the waterfall. Occasionally she would apply soap and eventually she would begin working on her hair, but to start with she just let the water wash over her and remove any excess sleep from her mind. It was also a great place to think. She spent a great deal of time massaging her legs, as they were going to become quite sore after two days of lots of walking. Still, great fun was always worth a little bit of soreness.

Haile turned off the shower and stepped out after wringing her long pink hair. As she reached for her towel something caught her eye and she turned her head towards her door. There at the bottom there was movement, someone was watching her from the doorway. Technically not illegal, they weren’t inside her bathroom. But still, she didn’t like the idea of just how close to the edge they came. Taking her towel and wrapping it around herself tightly, she stepped over to her door, noting they had disappeared.

Haile went through the door and looked around, about four feet away from the door and still accelerating a small group of three were still running for their lives. Haile giggled and stepped towards them slowly. “Well, well, well. What do we have here?” She said as she closed the distance. “Looking for a show?” She reached over them with her foot and stepped down, ending their retreat.

With her hand she pushed the towel between her legs and bent over slightly at the waist so she could see them. “Hello.” She said mockingly. Two of them bolted to either direction of her foot, the third just stared up at her, glued to the spot with her eyes.

Without even taking her eyes off them, she shifts her weight and brings the heel of her right foot down upon someone, instantly splattering their body across the floor with a wicked sickening crunch. She then glances away just long enough to land her other foot on top of the other fleeing figure, pinning them under her arch with half of her weight.

When she looked back at the figure beneath her she was surprised to see that they were still standing there, waiting. Visibly trembling, but otherwise motionless. She picked up her bloody foot and brought it over them, holding it above them. When she moved over and squelched on the wood she saw the person had cowered, curled up into a ball. Typical.

The struggles under her other foot had stopped, she had put too much weight on them and crushed their ribcage. Pity. Haile shrugged and looked up as she headed off back towards the door, leaving the pair of tinies behind her. One of them dying of internal injuries, the other merely coated lightly in gore. She glanced behind her one last time before she shut the door, they were together holding one another’s hands. Adorable. Haile shut the door and went back to her routine.

When she emerged from her bathroom again, this time fully dressed and ready to go she looked around her bedroom, spotting the splattered remains and the still corpse in the middle of her room. She decided to leave it alone and let her guests deal with it however they wanted to. If they needed her help she’d find it somewhere else.

She headed to her closet and within moments she was walking down the same deserted road as she had been before. She followed her footprints in the concrete and put in her music again to help pass the time. Her play list contained a lot of different music of many different genres. It seemed to be going through a heavy metal series that she thoroughly enjoyed. It was always entertaining to go through a tiny city while listening to music that made you want to thrash around wildly. Metal had this sort of tendency, and so did electronic music. Two of her more favourite genres to listen to when she went out.

In no time she arrived at the outskirts of the city. Her eyes roamed over the smoke that still billows up over the smoldering remains of fires long put out. Helicopters move about almost randomly as though they were searching for something. She could see scores of emergency response vehicles and even the bigger vehicles that were definitely military.

Seeing their military response was always entertaining, although sometimes annoying as well. Being shot at was still not very fun and occasionally they’d hit her somewhere sensitive and hurt her or even penetrate her skin and draw blood. It wasn’t very hard to fix after the fact, and most of their small arms didn’t hurt her, but still, pain of any kind was always a setback.

Her presence was already causing a reaction as uniformed people moved around, vehicles sped around and helicopters changed directions. What was a little fun while she worked?

As she approached she could hear weapons discharge and could feel them peppering her skin from her knees up to her chest. Her clothes might as well have been Kevlar for all their bullets did to harm her.

That wasn't very polite. Haile grimaced. Just because they couldn't hurt her didn't mean she didn't need to try not to hurt them. She jumped at them, lifting both of her feet up in the air and came crashing down through a two story office building, sending debris everywhere. Haile jumped again, and again, each time sending her feet through another building and finally landing in a large crowd.

She kicked with one foot and sent a few vehicles flying and turned a couple of people into paste as she connected with them. She brought her foot down, along with all of her weight onto a fleeing soldier. She drug her foot back and left a red smear on the ground. All gone.

She straightened back up, pulled her shirt back down as it had started riding up a bit higher over her abdomen. Her skirt would fly around as she jumped, but the heavier material allowed it to fall. An unfortunate side effect in smaller would was the delay it would take. In her world it would flap around and fall around her legs, but in tiny worlds it would lag in the air as terminal velocity would take over and the sheer volume of air it ‘consumed’ would cause it to remain aloft longer. Physics was stupid when different worlds collided.

Haile tilted her head one way and the other, cracking her upper spinal column slightly. She turned her eyes over to the factories. They had continued billowing thick black smoke in the air. Even in the event of such a natural disaster like herself, they kept working their employees. Despicable. Haile would have to see something about that.

Haile stepped through the town, her shoes clipping different buildings and kicking cars all over the place. There were very few people in the streets, most of the town had probably evacuated. She wondered where they had gone. To stay with family perhaps.

The factory came up to her breasts and the smoke stack rose above her head. That was the first thing she took care of. Her long, powerful fingers closed around the smoke stack. Her muscles rippled under her shirt as she shifted her weight, her free hand came up and and braced itself on the building which started to groan. The smoke stack ripped off the building in a shower of bricks and an expanding cloud of thick black smoke. Haile grimaced.

She pushed her hand through the building and stepped back, looking at the hole she created. Bricks and concrete cascaded down into the structure, the wide open factory floor. She peered into the building but couldn't make out what was going on inside. There were dozens of people running about inside and over catwalks.

Hailes fingers found purchase and ripped the hole wider. She brought her fist down onto the roof which caused a cascading structural failure which spread out for dozens of yards all around the impact site. She picked up her foot and crushed the wall in front of her, glass, metal, bricks and other debris flew everywhere.

There was an explosion inside the factory and Haile shielded her face. Fire erupted from a machine she didn't recognize and some molten metal, or maybe it was lava, spilled out onto the floor. The air was thick with smoke and screaming sounds, either people or metal.

Haile stepped back and surveyed the wreckage. Fire was everywhere and a thick white smoke now replaced the black smoke. She nodded her head. Good work. She tried to estimate how tall the building was but gave up when she found no windows to count. Again, how inconsiderate.

With a hmph she turned on her heel and tread her way back to what she had spied the other day as a shopping mall. After sifting through the building for a few minutes she found a women's clothing outlet. She scooped handfuls of clothes into her pouch and went carefully through the perfumes. It was extremely difficult to open some of the bottles or to spray some of the scenes, she ended up crushing many of them.

Not having found what she was looking for she sighed and gave up. She really would need Alli’s help. She should have brought her. Oh well, it could wait. This town had had it anyway, there was not much else to go through. Obviously the schools would be out, many business would be closed, and no one would be out shopping or having fun. Sad.

Haile pulled her phone out of her pocket and went through the apps. While she did there was an earth shattering kaboom from behind her. She turned lazily and saw the factory had blown itself apart, spraying building chunks for miles. She giggled innocently. Turning her attention back to her phone she located the app that she left running whenever she went out.

Opening it up she found that she had collected about seventy terabytes of data. Not bad for such a tiny town. She looked around one more time and sighed. She both loved and hated small towns. This was the end. She thumbed through a menu which led her to a great big red button. Her friend programmed it to look like this as a joke but she loved it. It made her feel like a maniac.

She held her phone out in front of her so that it was level with the ground, hunched her back and bent her waist a little bit. Suddenly she had turned into an Igor, or at least a gibbering mad scientist. She let loose her best evil laugh and pressed the giant red button with exaggerated glee.

Her phone made an extremely soft beeping noise that betrayed the devastation that it was causing. She sighed, sad that this wasn't some Hollywood movie that would give great visual effect. She put her phone back into her pocket and started walking back to her rendezvous point. She did note the eerie calm that always followed after activating her kill switch. No sirens anywhere. Just the sound of burning buildings and crumbling facade. There were a couple of explosions where the helicopters crashed moments after pressing the button, but she didn't take too much pleasure in it. One of them had been following her and had certainly captured some great footage. All of which she had stored on her phone, ready for editing and publishing.

Haile’s head bobbed to the music that blasted through her headphones as she walked down the deserted street toward home, her mind already completely forgotten the town behind her. Besides the good footage, the good food she had, and the new haul of people she brought in, it was a wholly unremarkable town. A small town like all other small towns. There were some gems, and the rest was garbage. Her eyes inspected her footprints leading in front of her, both coming and going. She tried to step outside of them, to destroy as much of the road as possible. If anyone was going to come this way, they were going to have a hard time of it.

Of course they could always go around the road. Off roading, etc. She shrugged, that’s probably what they’d do. Judging by the response of the military she had only a few more hours before a load of new people arrived on scene. They were probably just the first responders, close at hand, easy to deploy, recall, move around, etc. It was almost a certainty there would be more arriving by nightfall. She wondered what would have happened if she decided to hang around and see them home. Then she shook her head and dislodged the idea from her mind.

Her fingers reached into her pouch and moved a flap aside, revealing a few people she had snatched up without thinking earlier. While thumbing through her phone, inspecting all of the pictures she had stolen, she popped one of them into her mouth without looking at them. She sucked on them for quite some time before they popped and she slurped them back into her throat. She clicked her teeth a couple of times, crunching something that had been left behind. She swallowed it too without really thinking about it.

But not thinking about it wasn’t going to last forever and she started thinking about all of the inorganic matter she had ingested all of her life. She rarely got sick from eating inorganic material. Her body was very adept at sifting through nutrients and getting rid of waste. It probably had something to do with the nanites she had paid for that ‘lived’ in her intestines that dissolved anything that her body couldn't’t. Although, wouldn’t that make them a part of her body? And thusly, make her body capable of digesting anything? Oh the musings she had when walking home.

She still had to be careful though. Drinking a container of toxic sludge would probably give her cancer, and drinking a tub of acid or drain cleaner would probably dissolve her throat. Maybe she could get home fast enough to seek medical attention, but her body was almost like everyone else’s. She was made up of squishy blood and guts too, and all of it was just as fragile as anyone she would eat. The only difference was they weren’t quite so strong as to hurt her, projectiles and such lacked the kinetic energy to go through her skin, and she was so large that her own kinetic energy was enormous. Again, physics went weird when you combined different scales and forced them to work together. They hated that. It was like taking two very large men and stuffing them in a very tiny room. It would be polite at first, but then one of them would just have to stretch and the next thing you know they’d be smashing the furniture. Another one of her favourite quotes, although she surely butchered it.

She clicked the play button on one of the videos she had stolen and it started out promising. From the angle of the view and the shaking of the camera it was definitely a cell phone recording. She cheered inside, some worlds she visited didn’t have cell phones and she struggled to get good content from them. This one looked great, someone was running down a hallway as the lights ahead and all around flickered on and off. The cacophony was unbelievable. There was crashing and smashing and breaking glass. The camera flipped around and there was a terrified girl looking around and screaming something unintelligible. Of course you couldn’t understand what she said but she was obviously beside herself.

Light flooded the hallway as the roof was torn away and the walls buckled inwards and began to collapse. The girl threw her hands up to catch a large piece of rubble that would have ended her life, she dropped the phone and it hit the ground, casting a neat tablow of her outlined against the sky. Just before the rubble crushed her enormous fingers caught it out of the air and threw it out of frame. The girl fell to her bottom and nearly sat on the phone, her hands out stretched again as the fingers returned and encircled her.

She was lifted away and the phone had a perfect shot up the length of Haile’s body, her crotch occupying a good section of the screen and the top of the video just barely seeing Haile’s skewed face. She lifted the girl up over her breasts and deposited her into her mouth.The video continued to play as the phone’s owner was ground to an unrecognizable mass in Haile’s mouth. Her hands shot forward and extracted more students, some she tossed over her head and others she deposited into her pouch. Then she scooted forward, her body covering the video where the screen cracked, everything went dark, and the video ended.

Haile was nearly breathless. Seeing things from other points of view was exciting to say the least, and she was surely excited. She had almost missed her turn off, she was making new footprints in the road. She turned sharply, pulverizing a new section of road, and made her way back to home. An instant later and she was back inside her residence, taking off her shoes and setting her phone next to her computer.

She was going to spend the rest of the day building her next release. She was going to take the possibly thousands of hours of video and set up a couple of movies. She would use pictures and different angles, lots of videos, some professional and others amateur like the one she watched on her way home, and publish it. This was sure to be a big hit. With views like the one she had watched, it was definitely going to be big. She knew her customers, despite their requests, and having seen one really great view of her eating someone (not to mention how it showed off quite a lot of her body in the process), it was going to be very, very good.

While she was thinking about all the ways she was going to profit from this little town, she had grabbed a bowl of about ‘half sized’ people and placed them onto her desk. She smoothed out her skirt and sat down, pulling her chair into the desk. She popped a few people into her mouth and set to work. Images flashed across her screen as she sorted them. Much of her program could sort things by itself, but occasionally needed a bit of auditing.

She sorted through trees of images that it constructed and started trying to tell a story. This time she was going to go with a story about environmental protection and the importance of conserving nature. She focused on the factories and the buildings that supported them, the school that was failing to teach the correct ethics involved with protecting the environment, and her subsequent demolition of the offending structures and execution of the greatest offenders.

It tickled her inside and she loved the humor she could attach to something so violent. But this was just a run of the mill production, she had others. Hundreds of others. Her website was full of hundreds of thousands of hours of footage, most of it raw, but when she published a documentary or something it was always superb. She had a great number of customers. Many were subscribers of varying levels, each having different permissions and access to her work. The top of course having access to all of her raw footage and even some commentary.

Her phone rang, and her thought process came to a screeching hault. Shit. She looked to see who it was, and speaking of commentary it was her favourite commenter. One of her friends, Kat. Her picture flashed across the screen as it alerted her to the incoming communications request. She pulled down her shirt and smoothed out the wrinkles over her stomach, rearranged her breasts and pushed her hair behind her ears. She accepted the call and immediately the picture came to life with her beautiful friend on the other side.

“Hi, Haile.” She said, her voice low and alluring. Haile’s heart fluttered just a little bit every time she said hi to her like that.

“Hey, fancy you calling at a time like this.” She tried to sound casual.

Kat’s eyebrow twitched up and she leaned in, closer to the camera. “Oh? And what time is it that is so important?” Haile grinned, her green metallic braces showing off in front of the camera, some blood clearly visible between her lips. Kat’s eyes trained on Haile’s mouth and she nodded. “Been playing again?”

Haile nodded. “Yup. And I’ve got some great footage. I’m putting it together right now, I might be done in a few hours if you’d like to see it.” Haile tilted her head down and brought her shoulder up a bit, making her look shy and fragile. “If you want, that is.”

Kat’s mouth turns up in a smile and all of her teeth peek out between her full red lips. “I’d love to see it.” She winks and Haile inflates inside.

She blushes as she continues, “So, was there something you were calling about?”

Kat nodded and leaned back. She pulled a paper out from off screen and held it up next to her head, the words not really visible to Haile yet. It looked important though. “I just wanted to call and let you know that I’ve been accepted!”

Haile’s hands came together and she squealed like a little girl. “Oh congratulations! I knew you could do it!”

Kat grinned again. “Thank you Haile. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Oh hush,” Haile batted the screen playfully. “You could have written about anyone. I was just convenient.”

“And perfect!” She put the paper down and leaned forward again, her low cut top showing off just the right amount of skin. Haile tried not to stare. “Your business is so unique and so different. No one has done it before, and I doubt anyone will ever. You’re the world’s only provider of such unique stuff like that, and the world loves it! I love it.” Kat reached off screen and came back holding a little girl wearing a maid’s outfit. “Perfect!” She cuddles the little girl who tries her best to hug the massive cheek.

“Well, I do my best. You know.” Haile looks down, digging a circle in the wood with her toes. “See a niche, fill it.”

“It’s a beautiful thing you do, even if some people don’t agree with it. Never listen to their negativity, what you do brings joy and entertainment to millions and if it weren’t for you I would have never met Clarissa. So I have you to thank for that.” Haile watched as Kat gave Clarissa a light kiss who returned it daintily.

Haile nods, “Thanks Kat. You’re the greatest.”

She puts Clarissa off screen and turns her attention back to Haile. “No, you’re the greatest. In such hard times as these, everyone needs all the distraction they can get. Even if the distraction is more destruction. At least they can watch a pretty girl like yourself do it and to them that is fun.” Haile turns an even deeper shade of crimson.

“Kat…” She starts.

“Nope. I’m telling the truth and you know it. You haven’t succumbed to all of the fads that have been causing such a rift between people. So keep your chin up, I cannot wait to see your new movie. Will you let me know when it’s done?”

“Of course.” Haile let out her breath, how long had she been holding it?

“Good.” Kat leaned in and kissed the camera. “See you later, godzilla.” She winked at Haile and waived, then the screen froze and the call ended.