Collective gasps and even a few screams echoed across the crowd at the sound of the sirens, followed by an instant, deadening hush. The sound chilled Brandon’s bones far more than the bruising sensation of receiving a beat-down by a soldier. Out of the corner of his eye, what appeared curiously like a shadow drifted over the overcast cloud-cover sky. A storm?
As if through mind control, the entirety of the crowd of thousands knelt to their haunches. On their knees in the grass, no matter where they stood in relation to the statue, hands were clasped together and thrust over their heads. Even, it seemed, the previously gung-ho soldiers broke into what appeared to be genuflection and prayer. Brandon and Jason felt suddenly naked, as they were evidently the last standing people amongst the immense volume of bodies.
With everyone’s chins bowed toward the ground and hands pointed to heaven, a muffled whisper rose in odd tongues from every single person present. It was impossible to focus for long enough on any one person’s prayer, but Brandon could’ve sworn he heard the word “goddess” come out multiple times with utmost deference. The sirens had stopped, but the rhythmic chanting of the words under their breaths was almost louder.
“What’s going on?” Jason whispered to Brandon, genuinely afraid for the dozenth time today. He trembled.
“I don’t know.”
“What do we do?”
“Get down,” Brandon said, not eager to test the troopers again. “Just go with it. Don’t get singled out.” In demonstration, Brandon dropped to his knees and tried to copy the movements of his nearest stranger; Jason followed suit. Now every person gathered to the altar of their statue girl was on their knees, mumbling praises too muffled to make out.
The cold shadow first seen on the cloud cover had now drifted to the town square. Buildings were bathed in a twilight darkness. The shine of the gold statue glimmered despite the growing shroud, but the bodies around them were almost rendered invisible beneath the chilling blackness. He couldn’t say for certain, and it seemed unlikely, but the ground beneath Brandon’s knees seemed to vibrate, inflicting tremors in his body straight to the marrow. Though he’d kept his head bowed like the others, sheer necessity for comprehension of this craziness won over. The young man lifted his chin toward the sky, or at least what he’d previously estimated to be the sky, and found he wasn’t staring up at the clouds any longer. It took a full five seconds for the visage to register in his mind.
It was Nicole.
His sister.
Pouty-smiling, sunny-haired, sculpted-midriff Nicole in a cropped, breast-hugging shirt and scant denim short-shorts which bore her glorious sun-kissed thighs over the hapless metropolis which likely sat lower than her ankles.
At least, Brandon was pretty sure it was Nicole. It was tough to tell, considering he’d never in his life seen his sister standing over an entire cityscape in a body the size of a significant national landmass. He doubted anyone ever had, for that matter. The titanic perky nineteen-year-old’s gorgeously toned legs stretched so high up that he nearly sprung a crick in his neck just from trying to drink in the sight of his bratty “little” sister all in one go.
Brandon’s gaze darted back to the golden statue, which, despite how puny it made he and his fellow workers look, was an absolute rodent compared to the actual Nicole. He looked from the idol then back to his giga-scale sister, then once more, and suddenly the catastrophic truth clicked, despite making no discernable sense whatsoever. The memory of his final moments before the blackout came creeping back from his buried subconscious: the locked door, the miniature cities, the bustling micro-bodies within, the thundering of Nicole’s feet up the stairs, and at last the flash of light.
It couldn’t be.
He was so not having his deepest, darkest fantasy fulfilled by a combination of vile serendipity, misshapen laws of physics, and his very own baby sister with her snide laugh and earth-sized ego. Reality was not so cruel.
And yet it was. Almost as cruel as the near-instantaneous erection he had growing in his pants now; sickening as it was, the factors unique to his tastes at play here were almost too much to bear, and Nicole, no matter how much Brandon hated and repressed it, was a beautiful young woman.
Even worse, she made a beautiful young goddess as well.
Because, assuredly, that was what she was to these dedicated citizens. Brandon, and even Jason, understood that now. Not a dictator, not a warlord, but self-centered, conquest-claiming, girly-girly Nicole and her majestic, celestial body. Testosterone rocked his helpless body.
Just to confirm it wasn’t an illusion, the multiple-mile-high girl swung her hourglass hips from side to side and twirled her finger through her gleaming locks in that telltale way which indicated she was about to get something she wanted. Her opal-blue eyes widened with tangible glee. She giggled, and the sound of her laughter boomed and reverberated like a cannon crash through the streets. It was louder than either the sirens or the praises combined.
The chanting and prayer of the crowds swelled to its loudest point. Though all in whisper, the combined strength of the thousands of voices around Brandon and Jason was rising ever higher; their bodies worked double time to bow and gyrate, even with their noses pressed to the earth, in reverence to their blonde bombshell of a ruler.
And from the look on her sky-sized face, Nicole was savoring every last one of them and their soul-baring acts with unparalleled joy.
“Well, hello again, everyone. It’s me, your favorite goddess, come to see how work is coming on your latest little project for me,” she boomed with all the gusto of an infomercial girl, plus the gleaming white teeth to match. Nicole’s omnipresent voice seemed to permeate every surface of the city, rattling bones and the artificial earth alike. Light glinted off her broad palm as the sky-high spires of her fingers waggled in hypnotizing tandem. “I’m sure you all missed me very, very much.”
The prayer and chant-singing from the workers surrounding Brandon and Jason rose to yet higher volumes. It took all Brandon’s effort not to throw his hands over his ears to protect them, but frankly, so many of his senses were overloaded with shock and near-fainting conflict, it wouldn’t have made much difference. And despite their maddening surroundings, Brandon was just pleased to have an excuse to cower on his knees and help conceal the shameful hard-on in his jeans. But then again, judging by the screeching vigor from some of his compatriots, he doubted he was alone in this sexual sentiment.
He was just the only one who could call the miles-tall goddess a sister as well.
“Now everyone hold tight. I’m going to get a better look at you and your cute little handiwork,” Nicole declared. Her hand, still hovering over the city like a flying saucer, shifted to a point beyond Brandon’s sight, multiple streets away. Both of her arms spread wide, almost in an embrace, as she gripped the exterior city walls on opposite ends.
All around, the workers flattened themselves onto their stomachs, arms and legs spread wide. It was a singularly bizarre visage, with thousands of civilians in neat lines obediently prostrating themselves. Such a sight might’ve commanded the boys’ attentions longer, if it wasn’t for the far more macabre subject of Nicole and her half-mile-long arms, creamy-pale and toned by yoga, barely flexing with the effort to support the weight of the pitifully puny city.
“She’s picking us up,” Brandon hissed to Jason. His friend, nodding in the direction of their sea of fellow workers, copied again, and perhaps just in time. No sooner had the pair laid themselves in the grass like the rest when the entire city began to rumble.
While Nicole’s voice was powerful enough to make every surface hum, the seismic reality of actually being lifted thousands of feet into the air with almost no warning left a far more destructive impression, at least on Brandon’s stomach. He was just shocked no buildings came toppling down. Certainly they quaked hard enough, or maybe that was just his cranium vibrating.
“No shit she is!” Jason choked.