A field of bright red fabric, pockmarked by specks of lint and imperceptible clumps of fluff, stretches vast in every direction. The gigantic form of the swivel chairs backrest, hundreds of miles away, looms like a blood-red gas giant in the skies of an alien world. The air is as thick as soup. Damp too with the moisture of her sweat, built up over hours. The hot drops have since seeped into the cloth, wetting it and leaving a salted smell clinging to everything. A windless ambience, serene from a distance.
Sitting in one place for the morning left a damp and uncomfortable trench in the cushioning. It was refreshing when she could finally stand up, stretching and stuffing borrowed books into her bag. Flakes of dead, moulting skin and strings of loose denim now punctuate the landscape like huge boulders and fallen trees. Cracks where the cloth hills have stretched and torn are reminiscent of ravines, red splays of string dangling over the edges like vines. She has been gone just short of ten minutes, having sat for hours working, texting, chatting, all the while an ungodly pressure and heat was building up beneath like restless tectonics. The lingering heat makes this a red hell.
Even atop arching strands of loose, black hair, the inferno cannot be escaped. The ground burns with an intense residual heat, as if the misty rainforest is ablaze and every dust speck is a hot coal. To the briefest touch, the ground scorches, radiating upwards and scolding the skin of a dozen men and women who writhe, squealing in agony. At a scale where the heat of the cushioning can sting like fire, distance is warped what should be an inch feels like miles, the mighty outline of a desk and computer further still, and shelves of books across the aisle might as well be distant planets. Running is useless, if it were achievable; those meek creatures choose instead to tumble and scream on the hot, blistering cloth, draped in wetness from the musty air and their own seething sweat.
Clutching the ground with clawed hands, ripping up chunks, blistered and pumping with juicy flesh, they hear the moans and screams, the echo of the library, student laughter mixed with the hum of the lights. Some screams have given up, dissolved into tortured sobbing, some still are silent but shiver as though simmering on a pan. Skin pulsates and reddens and peels, letting blood. A sleek form passes by in the hazy distance, a woman with her bag slung over, and those who still can reach up and shriek for anything. A sharp glance could suffice to remind them they exist beyond suffering. She moves on without offering as much.
The last one collapses to his belly and spits out a cry. Unfeeling now in any other capacity, the heat has overthrown them. The thought of a cold death is comforting. The bodies twitch and still whine a little, far from home or really anything familiar, and burned in a land of rolling hills stained with an eye-straining red.
Giantess World
