The Great Awakening (Chapter 21)

Lilly could absolutely feel everything now. She always knew she had sensitive feet, prone to tickling that sent her into fits of giggles, but now there was no laughter, only warm-blooded elation and a fresh wave of goose bumps from scalp to sole. Extinction-level hysteria danced among the doughy grooves of her taut sole skin. Buildings crumbled instantaneously no matter how sturdy their makeup, no matter how deep their foundations; cars and trucks popped into shards; tens of thousands of living speckles pressed into her warm flesh for whatever fractions of a second they could manage to do so before succumbing, though they resisted with their collective strength that still amounted only to a flea’s effort against the crushing will of Lilly’s feet.

All of these countless obstacles thinner than needle tips prickled her skin at once, a feast for her nerve endings, though obviously incapable of harming Lilly in the slightest. Still, the collapsing urban gridwork succeeded in lighting up her senses in ways the cute little airplanes, boats, and tanks had failed to do. Corkscrewing the balls of her feet in place, Lilly marveled at the crackling sensations reigniting the tingles over every skin cell of her soles. She felt the Earth sinking just that little bit extra into deeper layers of ancient stone as she did this, carved to her shape wherever she chose to set foot. And certainly she would set them in other places as well, but first she had one more test to run.

Just like she did when tramping shoeless through hiking trail riverbeds, the girl flexed her toes up one at a time, separating them as far as she could, and then promptly clamped all of her toes to the city. Accordingly, a row of ten new craters was punched into Manhattan under the plump masses of her digit-ends, but most deliciously of all, she perceived architecture, bedrock, and infinitesimal humanity acting as a unified liquid and oozing up through her toe crevices, just like the silt in the creek bottoms she savored on her nature walks. Every unique texture of the crumpling city-scruff teased and soothed the especially delicate flesh which resided in the U-shaped valleys that separated each of Lilly’s toes. With or without the feeling of a babbling brook current gushing through as well, there was nothing she could recall being quite so fulfilling as this.

For several peaceful minutes, the girl took advantage of her position, writhing her toes and scrunching her soles to grind all to its basest elements, until every standing structure below her, whether manmade or just man, was leveled even with the ground. All of it turned to a uniform gray dust consisting of every ingredient Lilly had shuffled to oblivion under her delighted bare feet, but even in particle-form, the powdered devastation pampered the many millions of square inches that made up the undersides of her peds, from her unblemished heels to her pedicured toes. Without taking another step or even bending her knees, she stooped to examine the smoky playground around her feet. The spot she’d already trod upon NYC to reach this point was still quite apparent, what with the zig-zags scooped out by her treads, but even that site was still recognizable as city refuse, reduced to rubble hunks though it was. By comparison, the pulverized grunge under her bare feet now may as well have been grit dredged from the deepest basin of the ocean, and in fact, Lilly had to believe the weight of her trim, athletic, and cosmically-large body was capable of outmatching the pressure from the globe’s most dangerous underwater depths.

It was at this point, in bending to admire the eradicative effects of her adventurous pale-rose soles, that Lilly’s inquisitive eye was snagged by another target, or rather a hundred. Much like the twinkling light show of gunfire she’d discovered on the beach, now that she’d dipped her head back below the four-mile range to Manhattan, the girl was enthused to find the thoughtful populace had planned a similar spectacle for her to enjoy after their welcome parade. All the tallest rooftops, which were quite a few, sparkled not with yellow muzzle-flashes but jazzy blue dots of lightning. It reminded Lilly of a science experiment tracking static electricity in the dark, or perhaps just a disco party flecking the walls with color. Also unlike the blink-and-she-missed-it micro-gun spurts, these mysterious forces burned hotter and more drawn-out, giving the girl plenty of chance to track the many precious blue sources setting the city aglow just for her. One spot in particular, however, near the center of downtown, caught Lilly’s attention most of all for its enchanting brilliance that outshone the rest, like a high-class sapphire affixed to one of the most recognizable skyscrapers in the city. After she’d set her sights on it, the girl just couldn’t let it go.

One more ponderous step brought Lilly to bear over the latest objects of interest. The curious blue lights still blinked from the rooftops, dazzling the girl like rare jewels, and as she stooped over Midtown, they only became more brilliant and inviting. Of course the one she had her eye on most of all was the Empire State Building, large enough like the former Willis Tower in Chicago that the giantess could actually distinguish the once-tallest skyscraper in NYC from a crouched position, when she closed one eye and shielded the other from sunlight. It really was a remarkable sight to witness, and actually recognize the detailed skyline of the Big Apple’s most impressive buildings, albeit micro-scale enough compared to a girl of her stature that they would’ve looked more at home inside a snow globe, or rather a snow globe inside that snow globe. Lilly couldn’t help but giggle again as she reached for the center of the prickly razor-thin high-rise patch, extending her index and thumb closer and closer to the Empire State. She just had to collect it.

Repeating the same gestures that had mostly-successfully allowed her to perform this surgically delicate act back in Chicago as well, the girl inhaled deeply and clenched the air in her lungs to help keep her immense body still, like a sniper holding her breath just before the kill-shot. Then, eyeballing the meager width of the seventh-tallest building in NYC, Lilly again brought her fingertips together, with only a few of her hairs’ width separating the ridges of her fingerprints, and finally eased the enormous pads of soft skin around the sides of the building as though threading a needle. Heartened when she saw that the skyscraper had not only avoided turning to dust by an accidental bump with either finger, but that it was actually holding steady as she tenderly cinched her digits just close enough to grip and feel the fragile stone line of the twelve-hundred-foot-tall structure. Lilly exhaled through her nostrils, concentrating so intently her heart began to race, and plucked straight up.

Miraculously, the thing didn’t come apart in her fingers like a dead flower stem, nor did it bend in the wind while Lilly lifted her prize up from the ground closer to her face three miles in the air, as she fiercely protected the delicate skyscraper between the same ringed gridlines of her forefinger and thumb that had gripped the building and yanked it from its home in the first place. Consciously holding herself back from moving her hand too quickly, for fear of the high-rise being blown away just because she got over-enthusiastic, Lilly continued to hold her oxygen hostage, only truly inhaling again when she could hold the Empire State Building so near to her face that a misplaced puff of gleeful air from her lips could’ve blown it five miles out into the ocean beyond. The peak still shone with that adorable and mesmerizing azure beam.