Lauren's Live-in Landmass

In the basement of her new home, the hapless Lauren discovers a portal to a world much like her own, save that it's at a scale thousands of times smaller than what she's used to.

With immense size and zero culpability, Lauren decides to have a little fun in exactly the way you'd expect her to in a story like this.

Tags:

Giantess, giga giantess, Destruction, Footwear, Growth, Rampage Foot Crush, shoe crush

New house… new car… new job… A trifecta of the things that society tells you are the keys to happiness.

All these things ran through Lauren’s mind. This was supposed to be a happy time. Her career as a civil servant was just beginning in a lovely city with a low crime rate, she was independent for the very first time in her life, and her sign-on bonus meant that for the next week and a half, Lauren was utterly free to do anything she wanted!

But no. She wasn’t. Because part of the reason she had managed to get such a phenomenal rate on her new single-person home was because the previous owner did not take the liberty of cleaning out the basement before his odd and untimely disappearance. Within these scrawny scaffoldings was a veritable maze of leftovers: old machinery, car parts, home appliances, furniture, dishes, knickknacks, bits, bobbles, and all sorts of thingamabob hullabaloos. And since Lauren hadn’t yet been granted the opportunity to make friends yet, her options were to either pay two burly men with a truck to haul this out of here for her… or get the job done herself.

Lauren was nothing if not a go-getter. And considering she needed the space for the rest of her junk, it’s not like she had much of a choice aside from making it herself. So, standing at the foot of the basement stairs, she reached up and stretched before taking off her jacket and revealing her bare, olive-tinted arms. She tied it tightly around her waist, creating the illusion of a teal skirt. Lauren burrowed her toes in her sneakers – a pair of tightly-laced Old Skools allowed just enough breathing room to avoid choking her ankles – and she whacked the nose of the footwear against the floor a couple of times to make sure they were secure. Nodding, she flipped her relatively short hair out of her eyes and behind her back. Satisfied that she could get the aeration she needed in this musty crawlspace, she got to work.

“Alright, junk. Prepare to meet your maker…” Lauren grimaced at her corny line, then went all in.

Brandishing two garbage bags, Lauren stuffed the largest items first, creating a base that was enough for each sack to stand up on its own while Lauren filled them further. With a system in place, she managed to carve a clean swath through the field of rejected science fair projects. Still, it was slow work, and it slowed down even more whenever she encountered an object too big too stuff in the bag. Forced to make a detour and worry about it later, Lauren soon found in recalculating her routes that most paths crossed directly through a large, oblong piece of construction covered by a tarp.

“Okay, this thing has been a pain in my side for long enough,” Lauren growled before she grabbed the white cloth and with the fury of a hundred sons, she yanked it upwards.

The cloth landed delicately atop other objects. Lauren meanwhile was transfixed on what was within. A… platform. It didn’t look too dissimilar from a DDR cabinet, except instead of a screen complimenting your dancing, there was a console filled with dozens of switches, knobs, soulless status lights, and levers.

“Huh! I bet I could make some good money selling you on OfferUp. What is this… Pac-Man?” Lauren hopped on the platform and flipped the switches obliviously. “I used to play a lot of Pac-Man as a kid, but having my own cabinet? Maybe I shouldn’t sell you after all…” Lauren leaned down, inadvertently getting cobwebs in her face before reconnecting a few obviously out-of-place loose wires. Suddenly, a hum began to sound.

“Whoa, this thing’s got juice!” Lauren hopped to her feet, suddenly excited. She fiddled with the switches again, and the hum only got louder. She looked at her shoes; her feet were getting warm.

“Wait…” Lauren was beginning to worry. “Maybe I should’ve been a bit more careful about the levers I–

ZZZZAAAP!!!

***

 “Mmm… nrggg…”

Lauren felt an itch.

Her eyes fluttered open, and she was greeted with mottled light.

“Wh… what…?”

Lauren was groggy and slow. The itch was on her cheek. Her arm was buried under her pent-up thighs; when she tried to extricate it from beneath, she was rewarded by a sensation of pins and needles that seemed to pierce through to her bones.

“Urgh… where… where am I?”

Lauren tried to shift her head and turn the world upright. Her soft chin was sunken deep into the ground. What should’ve been concrete now had the consistency of dirt, and her head had inadvertently created a crater in the grayish material. The light was collecting into recognizable shapes now… the pastel blue of sky. Wherever she was, she was outside.

Lauren planted her palms on the floor – both times she did, her hand sunk a solid inch into the surface. At this, Lauren just shook her head; she’d worry about the muck that got onto her hands later. But now, she was able to hoist herself up to her knees.

“Whoa… why do I feel so… heavy?”

Lauren at first glanced out across the horizon to gauge an understanding of where she was. It was all green, brown, grey. Tufts of smoke seemed to pop up intermittently, floating with a cotton-like gentleness before dispersing into nothing as they approached Lauren. She reached a finger out to one, and when she retracted it, it felt… damp. Strangely enough, though she was just a bit nervous… she was nowhere near as worried as she felt she ought to be. Somehow, Lauren didn’t really glean the idea she was in any danger.

Still, all that looking at the horizon told Lauren was that the somewhat flat plain she was on terminated in a slight hill, but nothing else. However, when she looked downward… things became interesting.

The ground was a grid. Not a grid formed from the stiff ceramic plates that made up the kitchen floor, but one that was infinitely segmented and fractal. What Lauren at first mistook for a simple randomized pattern of grey-brown dirt instead betrayed the tiniest building blocks, few approaching the length of her thumb. Spires, crystalline. And running between them, thin layered paths fit only for ants or creatures of similar stature. It was like nothing Lauren had ever seen.

Lauren’s finger was still outstretched. Wanting to know more, she tried to aim it downward when she felt a slight tickle at the tip. Not of any consequence, but it provided enough of a sensation for her to retract her finger and gaze at her fingerprint.

Lauren took a few moments to realize what she was looking at. When she did… her heart dropped.

There, plastered on the print of her finger, was the smoldering outline of a plane. It was unmistakable, even if the fuselage was only an inky splotch of debris, already slipping off her pad and leaving just the ghostly image of the wreckage in its wake.

Lauren had no idea why… but somehow, she’d grown.

How big, she didn’t rightly know. Taller than most mountains on the planet, probably. Larger than any man-made structure on the planet, definitely.

“Holy shit!” Any grogginess was exorcised from Lauren’s earthshaking body.

Her brain went into overdrive as it sought to understand exactly where she was and why she was there. It took a moment to recall she had been in her new house’s basement last. She’d taken the tarp off a doohickey and then –

More earth-shattering cracks. They reached Lauren’s ears as minor crumbles, and they were the result of her relaxing in her place on the ground. She shifted her head to glance at her backside, and in that slight movement Lauren felt the magnitude of what she now was: millions, potentially billions of feet’s worth of capillaries, blood vessels, tendons, and muscles all under the control of one titanic woman. With every twitch, every breath, every step, every heartbeat, she commanded a wall of virile might that exceeded the biomass of some countries.

“This is… amazing,” Lauren thought. Her body had expanded by millions of tons. That weight added up, and when she gave it inertia, it was hard to put a stop to it. The fact that she could… meant her strength had increased to meet the demand of her body, and more.

Well, Lauren did not want to be an object at rest. She wanted to figure out what’s what.

Lauren reached back and planted her hands into the dirt; each one in its dark, lithe, splendorous glory was like its own interstellar vessel, a tendril of such inescapable size that it was inconceivable these were only the tiniest delineations of a larger body. Evacuations were well underway, with most of the workers, pedestrians, and safety departments having realized at the arrival of Lauren’s shadow the danger she posed. Apartment tenants were being funneled down the stairs with subtle urgency as the police tried their damndest to hold onto the tenuous grip of order. But it was a fool’s errand; once Lauren’s hand began its descent, chaos sprouted. In a bereaved desire for self-preservation, everybody who was capable of running, did. Parents scooped up their children, cars were broken into and driven off, buses skipped their routes and floored the gas. Even a few senior citizens in wheelchairs were ferried by good Samaritans – granted, to be used as a plow in worst case scenario – in a mad dash to get out of her shadow.

The spires of buildings and towers were powerless in the face of Lauren’s fingers. Their collapsing apexes were deftly dodged by the luckier escapees, but the upper levels were not. Buildings began to collapse as an entire borough came under the cover of Lauren’s hand as though it were the world’s largest tent. Her palm line could fit an entire river through its ridge. The various threads that created the print of her hand, each one so small and insignificant at normal size, were now massive enough that even their pores and imperfections were completely on display to all who wishes to spend their last moments on Earth to see it.

BRA-BROOOOM…!!!

The wrist of her palm dug into the ground, crippling kilometers’ worth of subway lines. Her fingers clutched the ground, each one dragging trenches of destruction that swept up vehicles, buildings, and people alike to grind them all up into a brown-gray mush.

Between making the decision to stand up and planting her hands on the ground to brace herself, it took Lauren perhaps twelve seconds. Far longer than it would’ve at normal size.

Wow… Lauren thought to herself. This body feels… weird…

It did. She had to expend just a bit more effort to move around. This was what she noticed as she got out of her squat and prepared to stand at full height. She shifted her thigh, its somewhat thicker girth making it swing slightly out of alignment from where Lauren wanted it. Her shins were utterly unbreakable, and when Lauren planted the sole of her sneaker onto one of the untouched areas she hadn’t been sleeping in, Lauren wondered just what she must’ve looked like to them. Even from the ankle to the knee was taller than any city structure by several orders of magnitude. And as she finally ascended to her full height, Lauren gasped as she realized the deep blue of the sky was beginning to meld with the dark indigo of the heavens above.

It was truly, strikingly, beautiful.

“I’m the first person on Earth to ever see a view like this…” Lauren said quietly to everybody still alive in the current zip code.

…

Was this Earth?

It was difficult to know for sure without knowing exactly how Lauren got where she was, though the most damning piece of evidence that this was not in fact Earth was that when Lauren looked into the sky, the moon was a muddy green. Lauren hadn’t simply grown, she’d been transported... somewhere.

“Well then…” Lauren looked down at her knees. Minuscule specks were converging at and around her ankles. Black choppers were venturing at the limit of their height.

Lauren experimentally lifted her foot. This action was small to her, but it was a monumental shift to the observers both on and off the ground, and the air displacement from that simple action sent most of the airborne vessels spinning out of their holding positions. Inside the cockpits, the pilots were using every bit of prowess they had to control the copters, all with the singular intention of navigating the gusts formed by the actions of one girl.

Two copters were on a collision course. The pilots radioed a desperate distress signal before taking the controls and veering as hard as they could out of the way. The two met – the propellers of one clipped the tail of another. Both careened in radical directions, ultimately exploding into fiery bursts against Lauren’s shins.

“Ah, ha!” Lauren couldn’t help but let a giggle come out. It tickled. She lifted her other foot, and another torrent of air sought to fill the massive void created by the absence of her shoe, in addition to the absence of the hundreds of buildings and skyscrapers that had been flattened out of existence beneath her.

Her foot hovered. Her muscles worked and bulged as they controlled the lithe, flexible limb, suspended in the air. It swung across the skyline and descended with an apocalyptic leisure upon the survivors, sobbing amidst the desiccated buildings that still dared to defy her by pointing their spires up toward her ankles.

She took another step.

CRA-SHHOOOM…!!!

The shockwave was the first portent of disaster, vaporizing windows and making building facades crumble. The rolling tidal wave of mud and debris that cratered outward further and further was the second, bulldozing and burying untold thousands under the rubble, and many, many more that simply splattered into gunk under the treads of her sneakers.

Every heartbeat that emanated from this creature’s incomprehensibly sized frame was a THUMP, THUMP, THUMP of a magnitude that could only be rivaled by the quake of the earth itself. There was an entire ecosystem embedded in Lauren’s body wrapped up in her olive skin, shrouded by the jacket she still wore around her waist.

She took another step.

All that Lauren saw were the light little puffs of dust that followed every descent of her shoes into the surprisingly malleable ground. Sometimes little lights would flash against her skin. They tickled.

Lauren stopped in place and glanced down to pull out her phone. Maybe that could shed some light on this odd situation she’d found herself in.

***

Sounds of frustration, terror, and human despair eked out amidst the jagged corpses of dismayed buildings and skyscrapers. Down on the ground floor, what had at one point been a contingent of National Guard troops sent to meet the threat had been reduced to a tenth of its size and converted into a disaster hospital where the doctors and non-doctors alike worked tirelessly to stay the bleeding of their brothers in arms as well as the civilians they’d pulled from the wreckage. The commanding officer’s leadership had been decapitated – quite literally – in the onslaught. The designated seconds-in-command had also been decapitated, figuratively this time. The seconds had instead been crushed and mixed into the rubble. This left nothing but a few privates and medics to pick up the pieces and make sense of the chaos.

Still, she loomed. There was a lot of rushing across the rubble to and from lean-tos that housed the latest wounded. Yet through it all, there was a concerted effort to avoid looking up. Looking up was enough to make anyone sink to their knees and pray. Clearly, this would be a hindrance to the operation. Therefore, looking up was avoided. But in their minds, everyone knew that this unexplainable girl with legs like… like… there was no structure on the planet capable of comparing to the enormity of those legs. The scaffoldings that bent into a makeshift awning above the hospital limited the sunlight capable of getting in, but those legs all but took up every bit of space through the aperture, their brilliance reflecting a teeming shine that was… beautiful.

Amidst the groans of pain and devastation, one voice was clearer than the rest. A man, both his legs removed. He was squirming on the scavenged bedsheet currently being used as a hospital bed, his eyes manic, glassy. They saw nothing He looked up as he chanted, “Diosa! Diosa!”

A nurse heard his lamentations and crouched next to him. She lowered a canteen to his lips, and he drank eagerly. “We’re doing everything we can, sir. Morphine is on the way; you just need to –”

“Diosa! Diosa!!” Water dribbled out the sides of his mouth as he choked on it and pointed upwards, past the nurse. She made the mistake of looking up.

She had moved. Her gravity-defying Old Skool sneaker had managed to defeat the planet’s force field for a mere moment and lift into the air. She was preparing to take another step.

The nurse screamed and fell back as though she had just seen a vision of her own death. It was bloodcurdling, and it pierced the tense conformity of the field hospital as all of a sudden, dozens of men and women realized they were about to be crushed. They descended into chaos, running, abandoning their charges and their patients, seeking shelter and self-preservation. All the while the foot seemed to descend excruciatingly slow, yet unavoidable. Its mass, its girth, its berth… it was about to become their everything. Every man, woman, and forlorn child underneath that awning had the chance to number the treads and imperfections imbedded in the rubber of their sneaker to count down toward their inevitable demise.

Until…

BRA-BOOOOOOOOM…!!!

What was once a ramshackle field hospital had been reduced to a muddy plane, lined with trenches in the exact pattern as the undersides of her shoes.

***

“Alright Google, do your magic…” Lauren was having a bit of trouble believing she’d been transported to some otherworldly locale, while also having been expanded to the size that she was. It just seemed a bit too Twilight Zone-ey for her taste. If there were a simple answer for any of this, it would be through Google. She paced absentmindedly as she waited for the search client to pop up, the little blue progress bar beneath the ribbon stuck at about 12% of its length.

“C’mon…” Lauren was willing to make a few sacrifices as a young woman living alone in her own house, but one thing she never skimped on was service. 4G LTE data was supposed to be a given, and yet her phone seemed to be seeing none of it.

“Dammit!” Lauren said, dejected. Stuck in the middle of nowhere with no service. It was a long shot, Lauren thought. But in the meantime, she might as well check to see if there were regular shmegular Plain Jane wi-fi. If she could get to the signal, she might be able to find whoever made this… disturbingly realistic model of a sprawling city center at one gazillionth scale.

Lauren felt an itch again and looked to her shins. More fiery red sparks, burning out as they slammed against her skin and the edges of her socks. They might’ve been fireflies to the untrained eye. Lauren however could just about see the paths of the most faintest volleys of projectiles, a hazy stream being sent from just a few paces away. More little bugs – these took the shape of fighter jets – zipped between her stalwart legs in a twirl, climbing higher and higher over a period of several seconds.

“Oh? More of you little guys?” she asked.

Her voice seemed to have an effect on their path; the pressure produced by her mouth jarred them. Yet they regained course soon enough. Lauren twisted and tried to count them as they circled her waist, though it was at least as difficult as it would’ve been to count a collection of fruit flies swarming in one’s kitchen. “One, two, four, eight, sixteen… ish…” Sixteen. Maybe more. They flitted in a measured way; they still had to obey the rules of gravity. A gnat or fly could turn on a dime, but not these. They had to build up speed, and they couldn’t extrajudiciously accelerate in any direction they so chose. Half of the squadron seemed just about to reach the top of Lauren’s head, but only after a long and arduous climb at a steady pace.

Once they had aligned with Lauren’s face… they fired.

“Ach!” Lauren cringed. It was a natural human reaction upon seeing any projectile coming toward your face, whether it was a rubber band or a 9 millimeter bullet.

But in this case, the true danger was far, far beneath either of those. Lauren at first hadn’t even registered the gentle warmth that specked a point on her cheek; she thought the missile missed, or perhaps she was mistaken in having seen it fire earlier.

But it had fired. The projectile was on target, and it achieved a direct at the intended target of Lauren’s visage. But it exploded harmlessly.

Lauren peeked out of her eyes, noticing another missile veering forth. This one she was unable to hide from, and the shiny spark splashed into a fiery light above her eyelid. Lauren’s skin perceived it as nothing more than a pinprick.

“Oh? Ohhhhh…!” Lauren let out a smile as the bug-like planes continued to swerve in wide arcs around her face. Their bombing runs increased in frequency as they fired off volley after volley, yet Lauren was unscathed. Missiles were no more harmful than an exfoliating cream. Wave after wave of bullets blasted in a haze against her, targeting her neck, cheek, forehead, hair, nose. They tickled sometimes when Lauren’s stray inhales brought them up her nasal cavities, but otherwise made no lasting damage. Even her choker had no scruff marks or blemishes. Lauren was so awestruck at her invulnerability that she was lost in it, her smile growing more and more as she outspread her arms, the universal signal for “Come and get me, suckers!”

The planes would’ve obliged (after navigating the air currents formed by her arm movements of courses), but after a few repetitions of this routine, they were already out of ammo. And Lauren could pick up on that fact as the volleys slowed to a trickle, and finally nothing at all.

“AH-HAHAHAHAHAHA!” Lauren belted out an Earth-shaking guffaw. This laugh was enough to form splinters in the cockpit windows of the remaining jets. From within, their pilots fought to maintain control as the oxygen supply threatened to leak out now that the hull was compromised. They needed to turn back and regroup somewhere else, live to fight another day. But Lauren wouldn’t give them that chance. In a giddy act of play, Lauren stood on the ball of her left foot and twirled, flailing her arms like a ballerina in an unadulterated celebration of her imperviousness. The flap of her arms created whirlwind-style gusts. The meteorological waves overtook the pilots, and the planes careened like spinning tops out of the air, exploding harmlessly out of range of Lauren’s purview.

“Serves you right!” Lauren cheered. Somehow, her erstwhile apprehension and confusion had been replaced with simple joy. Discovering that she was for all intents and purposes was at least one huge weight off her back. Then, her phone buzzed: a signal that it had found a Wi-Fi connection. That would be the second weight lifted.

“Oh!”

She brought her phone in front of her face. The white glass reflected the light and created what seemed like a second sun when viewed from the correct angles on the ground. It was blinding for the survivors.

“Wow… this is a lot of Wi-Fi networks…” It would take Lauren several minutes to scroll through them all if she tried. Lauren hadn’t quite put it together yet, but this was a result of her phone’s expanded size, thereby increasing the range of its antenna. It could connect to networks from many miles away at a shrunken perspective, but it maxed out at a few hundred meters according to Lauren’s. With every fidget and twitch, Lauren was inadvertently snuffing out the routers that hosted several of these networks, but eventually she was able to connect.

“Okay…” Lauren tried Google again, but once again it did not work. Lauren cursed. Then, a pop-up emerged on her phone. It was one of those network login webpages, common for school and college wireless networks. It asked Lauren to input her nonexistent user info, though there was a guest login that Lauren was about to enter into… when she noticed the school (West Centennial University, to be precise. No such school existed anywhere that Lauren was aware of) had a gamut of social media profiles beneath the home button. Their insignias looked… similar to that of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, the whole shebang. Yet different.

Lauren connected to the guest Wi-Fi, then returned to the homepage. Google still wasn’t working, meaning she was unable to search for… whatever those websites were, and she needed to go into them directly through a link.

So she did. “Flipper”, as it apparently was called, had a similar layout to Lauren’s far more familiar Twitter. Lauren was hit by an advertisement to download the app rather than use the browser version (as she had anticipated), and once she did, she was astounded. Timeline, newspage, search, it was like staring into a mirror.

It would seem also that Lauren had already become an internet sensation. Lauren checked one social media account of a cute-looking blonde girl profile picture. She scrolled to the beginning of the day and checked the tweets.

Ill be liveflipping my outing to the mall, bro wanted to try out his new electric scooter. The attached photo showed her making a goofy face next to her brother.

Saw a really fat pigoen holding a potato chip in its beak lol. The bird was indeed fat, and it was gripping a potato chip.

WTFFF A GIANT WOMAN IS HERE OH MY FUCKING GOD EVERYBODY SHES GOING TO KILL US ALL OH MY FUCKING GODDDDDD Lauren had to admit, from that angle, she did look pretty fucking scary.

“Good thing I’m way up here… and not down there…”

There were countless social media profiles with that same format: they had catalogues of thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of posts before all of a sudden careening into panicked declarations of fear and despair. Someone posted their time in a field hospital before their posts suddenly stopped. A livestream function revealed another family was hiding in a shelter, the woman clutching her unconscious spouse close while she pleaded for any sort of help or rescue. There was a window in the background of the video, and Lauren suddenly wanted to try something.

Lauren hopped on her toes, lightly, but just enough to make an impact.

From her phone, she could feel the vibration as the bass speakers sought to replicate the sound of the quake. The woman was shocked into silence and clutched her husband tighter. A wave of dust rolled across the window in the far off distance.

Bingo.

Just enough information to get Lauren what she needed.

She turned away from her phone and scanned the ground. Her footsteps had made quite a trail, as had her dance routine that corkscrewed a spiral path in the cityscaped dirt. But Lauren could tell just about where her target was..

Boom…

Her phone vibrated again as Lauren took another step. There was a delay of a few seconds. The man was groaning.

Boom!

The cinderblocks were shaking in their placements, and dust was beginning to fall in a cloud around the family. The single basement lightbulb swung precariously above them as the woman went into a prayer.

Boom!

The quake was enough to cause half the basement to collapse into rubble. The screaming was rampant, the phone went flying as the group tried to get their bearings. The camera now stared dumbly upward, where a slight hole revealed a little patch of sky.

Lauren was looking at this. She knew she was close enough now. And when she next raised her foot, she could see in the livestream the image of the underside of her well-worn shoe preparing to stomp down one more time. Their screams crescendoed into a symphony as they desperately begged for life.

BOOMMM!!!

The feed went out. The livestream ended.

Any piece of that phone had been reduced to silicon powder. Any remaining pieces of that family had been reduced to just carbon, compressed and condensed into the sole of Lauren’s footprint.

“Alright guys,” Lauren announced, as though she was preparing to leave a housewarming party. “This has been fun… but I think I’m finally starting to get a little…”

Suddenly, a light enveloped Lauren.

This light ate away at her body in a brilliant presentation, and she disappeared into a million shining stars.

***

“…tired.”

Lauren was back in her basement.

She was standing in the DDR platform. The machine was active. A clocklike display read a blinking “00:00” for a few moments before suddenly switching to “00:30”. Various gauges displayed values that Lauren could only hazard ill-informed guesses at the true nature of.

“Ahhhh…” Lauren took the moment to stretch. She’d forgotten how flexible her body felt. It was nice to be limber. “What just happened?” Lauren asked herself. “Was that… a dream?”

Then: “Dammit!” she yelled out. “I should’ve taken pic…tures…”

Lauren realized. Then she blared through her phone, unlocking it.

It was still there.

An artifact of another world. The “Flipper” app. It was right there.

Lauren took another look at the machine, and her face curled into a grin.

If that machine could be her ticket to and from this new world at will…

She definitely knew she got a bargain with this house.

Comments

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