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Author's Chapter Notes:

Thank you all for reading this story, and I appreciate all of the praise and critique that I have received. It was all unexpected really. Anyway. I've started a continuation, of sorts. Unlike the first parts which were written in one sitting as a result of a fervent strike of inspiration and then posted in relatively rapid succession, I'm going to have to take a bit more time with this one and post as and when I finish chapter, which means there will likely be longer periods of time between postings.

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Maureen didn't know how or why she survived. The last thing that she could remember before everything went dark was the impossibly vast face of her friend and work colleague Diane Smith, grinning down at the helpless throng of people with an expression that could only be described as pure, malicious delight. The same face that she had greeted at the front desk of the office, now a mere pile of rubble among so many others in the devastated wasteland that was once a thriving minor city, nearly every work day for the past few days now heralded the end for so many innocent lives. 

If she closed her eyes she could see that desperately pretty face again, looming past the few tall skyscrapers that still stood amidst the scenes of near endless destruction, now rendered impotent and pathetic by the giantess's sheer, impossible size. Great, green eyes peered down an elegant nose at the teeming masses of humanity flooding the streets beneath her chin. She remembered a vast fingertip appearing overhead to block out the sun, with every line and crevice in that impossibly gargantuan digit etched in her memory, and then descend with merciless finality upon the crowd of shrieking, screaming men and women that she was a part of. The tallest of the structures could barely put up even a second of resistance, indenting the soft skin only slightly until the relatively limitless strength of a single, massive finger inevitably overpowered that of these comparatively fragile manmade structures. The buildings collapsed from the top down, showering the streets with crumbling chunks of concrete and glass and crushed many beneath their weight in a grim prelude of what was to follow. The noise of the impact, however, was drowned out by the cacophony of panic and chaos that only rose in intensity and volume with the collective realisation of their shared, doomed fate. Maureen could remember being pushed and shoved, jostled around by a multitude of people desperate to escape; some might have been friends, or faces she'd seen multiple times in the streets, or had met in clubs, bagged her groceries, served her coffee, or driven her home. They were all gone now, crushed into thin layers of organic material in a yawning chasm stretching hundreds of yards wide down what was once the heart of the town's cultural life, formed by a titanic woman's lusts for domination.

Images of the utter ruin of her hometown flashed before Maureen's eyes in a chaotic jumble of broken skyscrapers, massive footprints where streets of vibrant culture and industry or simple mundane life once existed, and the grisly, flattened remains of people crushed to death beneath the goddess's feet. The gleeful laughter rendered terrifying by both its volume and the horrors it heralded echoed in her mind, drowning out the noise of the outside world around her. Above all, however, what was most vivid in her memory was the feeling of utter insignificance; watching this giantess, this immense woman, so effortlessly lay waste to everything and everyone she had known and loved for her entire life, and enjoying it so much in the process, made her feel pathetic, weak, useless, and above all tiny. She, like everyone else, was a tiny 'mite', as Diane had described the entire race of mankind with a voice that literally came from the heavens, to be stepped on, crushed, or simply forgotten about. 

If there had been any malice or hatred, however irrational, in the giant woman's expression as she destroyed the city and murdered tens of thousands of innocent people then Maureen might have understood. But no, such death and destruction was always accompanied by a pretty face with a happy smile and eyes twinkling with unrestricted glee. She tried to imagine the horror she had just gone through from Diane's perspective, as though it was her, not this low grade admin worker, who had inexplicably grown to such a colossal size. She imagined standing with her head in the clouds and the city at her feet, with its glittering towers of glass, steel, and concrete barely cresting past the curve of her ankle bone and its inhabitants barely visible as specks scurrying through the streets. Her foot would rise from the yawning crater formed by the vast mass of her miles-tall body merely standing upon the fragile landscape, and sweep ominously over the heads of hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny, doomed individuals. She would flex her dainty toes, to see between them what she was about to step on; thin black and grey lines of streets, flooded with hordes of wailing people pushing and pulling and fighting in vain to escape their fate, marking out blocks of high rise apartments, shops, offices, town houses, gyms, libraries, cinemas, schools, and all of that busy city life that had been singled out to be touched by a goddess. Perhaps Diane herself was down there amongst them, a mere speck running with hundreds of others down the streets, only to turn and look up to see a vast sole filling the sky above. She imagined the raw sensation of sheer, unrestrained power that she, a mere woman, would possess over the entire frightened race of mankind purely from her immense size alone, and she too would smile as the real goddess Diane had done.

"You better run you tiny, worthless bugs," she would say, "before I step on you, and crush your little city beneath my big foot like this." She broke into an evil giggle, and her toes descended on the doomed crowds.

A light jab to the ribs brought her abruptly from her sadistic fantasy and back into the real world. Maureen was disappointed to see not endless open sky and a city at her feet but the grim, sombre, poorly lit interior of an army truck filled with sick, injured, terrified people. Somewhere a woman was sobbing, while a man yelled at her to shut up. They all sat on uncomfortable wooden benches along the length of the hold, with Maureen sitting approximately in the middle between a man wearing a dusty, torn business suit with his arm wrapped up in a sling and a blank thousand-yard stare and an elderly woman who, despite the horror she had witnessed and the dismal state of her clothing, maintained an air of quiet refinement and dignity. It must have been the woman who had nudged her, she thought. Standing in front of her was a soldier of some description, she wasn't sure, in dirty stained military fatigues, and who looked down at her expectantly. In his hand he held a notepad, which he tapped with some irritation with the end of his pen.

"Name?" he said, with an insistent tone of voice that implied that this wasn't the first time he'd asked her. Maureen finally noticed that the truck had stopped, though she had no idea where she and the other survivors had been taken.

"Maureen," she answered quietly. "Maureen Hatton."

The solder scribbled something down on his notepad and stepped to ask the same question to the quiet man sitting next to her. It was only then that Maureen became aware of the warmth between her legs, which she crossed awkwardly lest people somehow detect her state of arousal. A soft, red blush came to her tanned cheeks and she squirmed in her seat, suddenly feeling embarrassed and ashamed that she could feel that way about something so horrible. Yet, as she tried to calm herself down she could not deny to herself that the idea of possessing such size and the power that came with it was exceedingly erotic to her.

The soldiers and aid workers had found her with a small group of fellow survivors, entombed within a heap of crumbled masonry that was once a movie theatre. She had no recollection of how she found herself inside, but had been told that someone had carried her unconscious body inside. It was pure luck that this structure, or, to be more accurate when one considers the sheer size of the woman who had so very nearly ended her life, this portion of the city block was spared the fickle, destructive whims of the giantess. 

From there she and the other people who had taken refuge were escorted on foot through the ruined city. The giantess was gone by that point, but the regular shudders that reverberated through the ground through her weary feet as she was marched through the abandoned streets served as a constant reminder of her presence. Every two seconds or so, sometimes longer and sometimes shorter, the ground itself would shake, as if trembling in fear from the unseen colossal woman. One of their number would lose their footing with the tremors and fall, or a building that had already suffered greatly in the chaos but somehow survived her passing, its sides marred with spiders' webs of crumbling masonry and its structure leaning drunkenly on foundations twisted by a giantess's mere passing, would finally give up its futile attempts to remain standing and would simply collapse in a cascade of concrete and debris into the streets.

The journey to the holding camp on the outskirts of town was long and arduous, for the roads and streets were in no fit state to allow easy transit of so many people. At about half an hour into their journey the landscape began to slope upwards, and then culminated in a steep hill, almost like a cliff, that was made up of a jumbled mess of different buildings, unrecognisable lumps of concrete, damaged cars, and a seemingly random selection of everything possible. The soldiers escorting them had decided that the best route around this obstacle was straight over it, though it took a great deal of effort and patience on their part to help the less able survivors scramble over the rough terrain.

Maureen's watch had stopped and her phone had ran out of battery, so she could not accurately gauge how long it took for them to climb over this ridge, this catastrophic upheaval of the ground that was merely a side effect of Diane's murderous play. Nevertheless, the sun had made considerable headway in its journey in the sky by the time they had reached the summit, and Maureen could stand upon a jumbled mess of concrete that was probably a bank of some description and look down to see a yawning chasm several hundred feet wide and many more long. It was her finger; it was the giant woman's finger that caused this great rent in the landscape.

The ground below appeared to be very smooth, much like the footprint that Maureen had unwittingly stumbled into when Diane was smaller but still deadly, but on a far larger scale. It was difficult to tell from her vantage point, but in the mottled greys and browns of this chasm, made by a goddess lazily dragging her finger across a few busy city streets, she thought she could make out where those streets were, and where there once buildings, shops, high-value apartment buildings, banks, and offices. She thought of the people that, hours before, had flooded those streets, cast into darkness by the immense digit of the goddess Diane, who, like her, were stricken by mortal terror and struggling to escape the doom falling upon them. She had somehow survived, and yet she peered down at the empty desolate wastes that the soldiers were about to lead the survivors into, she felt a horrid, sickening sensation when she realised that the remains of hundreds, if not thousands, of people must lie crushed in that chasm. Just like the footprint, she thought, only this time, not even bloodied stains would remain of those unfortunate souls.

Sudden light brought Maureen back out of her morbid memories, and she looked up to see that the flap on the back of the truck had been pulled back. It was now dark outside, but the light from various bright spotlights pointing down from tall mounts illuminated a large field littered with tents. Her fellow refugees likewise shielded their eyes from the brightness, and peered through gaps in fingers to see. The form of a soldier climbing into the back of the truck was silhouetted by this light, such that Maureen could not adequately make out his features, only that he held another clipboard in his hand. The soldier in the truck turned on his heels and snapped to attention, bringing his hand stiffly to his forehead in a smart salute to the newcomer, marking him out as an officer of some sort. A quiet, expectant hush fell amongst the refugees in the truck.

"The National Guard has brought you here for your own safety," said the officer, his voice, though loud, sounded dry from overuse. "The country is now under martial law as we deal with this emergency. I cannot tell you when you will be allowed to return to your homes, but for the time being you will remain here in this camp where we will give you food, water, a roof over your head, and medical treatment if needed. I know many of you are eager to find your friends and family, and we will do our best to help you do that. However, our first priority is to make sure everybody is safe, so we would appreciate your patience."

With that, the officer clambered out of the back of the truck and disappeared into the crowds beyond. Under the direction of the remaining soldier, the refugees rose from their seats and stumbled falteringly out of the truck and into the field. There, Maureen became lost in the crowd of fellow survivors, being herded and prodded and directed by more armed soldiers, while men and women in smart business suits and a few in white coats weaved their way through the churning mass of humanity to select one or two frightened and bewildered individuals away. As she, helpless as ever, stood and watched as everyone filtered around her like a rock in a shallow flowing stream to be filtered and processed, she could not help but feel that where she was now was no safer than in the ruins of her former home.

As she shambled forth to whatever fate awaited her here in this camp, it occurred to her that from now on nothing would ever be the same again for her and for the whole world.

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