Addison's boots crunched through the pebbled path snaking in front of Kaiser and Wiggins's main entrance. The girl did not feel like a Goddess yet – despite that she was one, at least, according to Dr. Goof's sacred belief.

At first glance, West Grove still looked and felt and sounded the same as it used to. Then Addison bent around a corner, and the main road came into view. Addison could see no one now where normally processions of commuters thronged all wrought up around the central intersection. There was no soul on the street. She saw cars, though. Many cars, busses and lories and cabs and such – and all zigzaggingly hither and thither parked. Some stood even folded into one another as they'd apparently crashed into each other. While others had seemingly chosen to drive up against a wall or a pole or straight through a shop window instead.

One car, a yellow beetle, had toppled a fountain. Water was spraying violently against the underside of the vehicle.

Addison's boots came to a halt when she yanked the door of a random car open. All empty. Or so it seemed. When she took a closer look, she could see speck-sized dots scurrying about in the car. Some were running away from her, and some at her. She noticed movement on the pavement down below also. Crouching down, she squinted and saw minuscule dots teeming about in the grooves of the street tiles down below.

Little people. He actually shrunk them all but left the infrastructure intact. Addison thought, amused.

Addison was about to stand up when she saw a 'large' group approaching her. There had to be at least a hundred dots or so crawling around there. They were forming a pattern with each other. A word.

Help It stated.

Addison stood back up, smiled, and hovered her boot over them for a moment before placing it down like she was about to squash a cigarette. She saw all dots scrambling every which way. But it was already too late. Her boot squished a good chunk of them. A few escaped, though, as a handful of dots scrambled off with a laughable pace. Addison decided to leave them and scuttled further. The dead ones were the lucky ones anyway. It vexed her that she needed to crane her neck. Besides all the people of West Grove, everything else was normal-sized still. She still had to look up if her eyes wanted to observe the top floor of West Grove's many skyscrapers, but this was not the case with the rest of the world. Another thought made her happy, however. The realization that this was all hers now. She owned this entire city like she owned all the stuff in her own bedroom.

Only she decided what became of them. And if it was the wish of others to change a building's purpose, they would have to knock on her door to make a request. Not that there were many others in the city – at least, other ones that were big and worthy of enough to socialize with. A dozen selected individuals remained normal-sized after the big shrink. By command of Addison. A few girls she knew from school – some of them a few years older than her. Addison liked them even though most of them did not like her. But it did not matter now anymore. No longer was it needed for Addison to fight for the acceptance of others. In this new world, people had to get used to the fact that everything revolves around Addison now. Coming into good graces with The Goddess was vital for survival. Addison had also allowed leaving a few staff members of Kaiser and Wiggins a bit bigger than the rest – three feet tall, to be precise. And their only purpose in life was to pamper Addison and her friends as their thralls.

"What about betrayal?" Addison had objected to Dr. Goof. "I may be a Goddess, as you like to say, but I'm still vulnerable."

Dr. Goof gave her merely a cheeky smile, which looked more than hideous when conjured on the face of someone that appeared so unsightly. "The chip I've injected in your body is one of a kind, miss Wiggins. It makes you immune to every form of energy needed to shrink matter. In other words, you will always remain the same size."

"But I will still feel the hardness of a hammer if one of my 'friends' decide to crack my skull with it, won't I?" Addison countered.

Dr. Goof lowered his eyes, looking dreary. He sighed. "I wish I had an answer to that, Miss Wiggins. I really do. The only advice I can give you is to trust your intuition."

"That's it? So the only thing that stands between my reign over them or my demise by them is my intuition?"

"Well, that and a pinch of gullibility." Dr. Goof smiled.

Addison looked puzzled.

"Hear me out, Miss Wiggins. As a precautionary measure, I've told the ladies that the chip in their body can gauge vibrational energy emitted during strong emotions. In other words, the chip will know when its host is radiating negative emotions such as anxiety, irritation, or anger – which radiate at a high frequency – or positive ones like happiness, contentment, or joy – which radiate at a low frequency. The chip also knows on whom the emotion is focused. So if any of them takes the liberty to allow even a single bad thought about you, they will immediately shrink down to subatomic level."

Addison looked back, perplexed. "Is a thing like that even possible?" she did not understand everything in that explanation, but enough to get the gist.

"Of course it is, Miss Wiggins! In science, everything is possible." Dr. Goof beamed with his arms wide.

"Great! That reassures me a lot!"

As Addison sauntered her way towards the city's outskirts, she contemplated her conversation with Dr. Goof right before he shrunk himself to live his life in a microscopic mansion upon Addison's desk.

He should have left it at that. Addison thought. He should have kept me believing in that lie.

But Dr. Goof didn't because right after, he casually told Addison that the story was nothing more than a mere bluff and that no such thing as gauging a person's emotions was possible. "But you believed me, didn't you?" He had told her. "Then so will they."

Addison believed that the foundation of such a lie would only remain stable if she would believe it too. But she did not anymore. Not after Dr. Goof chuckled like a hyena while confessing to her that it was simply a made-up theory. Addison feared that one of her friends would one day sense her anxiety and that it would encourage her to challenge the mental limits embedded in her mind. But then again, Addison was quite confident that her intuition would already notify some red flags by then. Addison would not only shrink that particular girl, but she would also kill her in front of the others. That will definitely push the rest of them back in line, for a while.

Of course, she could always resort to shrinking everyone down to nothingness. No threat to fear from a speck-sized being, right? But then she had to face loneliness, and that was an enemy she did not dare to face – not even as an all-powerful Goddess.

Terrance looked out of the window of his bedroom built on the 10th floor. His eyes drank in the view far down below where all of his fellow citizens went on with their daily lives – scurrying through an endless network of roads, paths and streets paved around blocks filled with houses, soaring structures and parks like diligent ants.

Most of them had seen the broadcast late at night the day before, but definitely, all knew about it by now. Terrance was pretty confident of that, Losburg's gossip spirit would arrange the spread of such news smoothly and swiftly.

Everyone knew and yet everyone still seemed to act like nothing out of the extraordinary had happened. But Terrance knew better, though. Despite that Addison girl's insecure and rickety performance proclaiming herself the new Goddess of the world on public television, Terrance had a hunch that her threat was real.

While every member of his family guffawed on the couch in front of the television, Terrance took it all earnestly. There was also something else that kept him transfixed at the ninth-grader promising prosperity and peace under her reign. This Addison looked actually kind of cute with that tousled blond hairdo and mischievous grin. She was a few years older than Terrance, but he wouldn't mind being forced under her control. He would bow down to her.

He was pretty confident that the rest of Losburg would think otherwise.

But what is that? Terrance squinted his eyes at the far horizon for he could have sworn he saw movement there of something massive.