Dinner for One (Chapter 6)

And following only five minutes of that surging highly-locomotive underfoot furor to the tune of a catchy song, during which Cody was left feeling weaker and closer to psychologically crippled than he had been during a whole half-hour of being treaded upon while the girl was wandering barefoot and in no hurry around the house, the already-desperate atmosphere inside her shoe began to shift. The temperature bubbled up by what felt like forty degrees, pelting the micro-shrinker with cooking skin-tingling sauna warmth far worse than anything he’d ever experienced even around Kayla’s immediately-post workout peds. The air supply, already scant to begin with, felt like it was being absorbed away directly into the spongy landmass of sole piled atop Cody, leaving him gasping and choking for another rasp of bitterly-filtered air that rendered him sick even when he had enough.

In place of that oxygen, then, came a gradual but wrathful tide of sticky frothy gushing sweat which the little thing splayed so helplessly under Bri truly couldn’t have predicted, even knowing how small he was now and what a hardworking physical endeavor the giantess was engaged in now. It didn’t just dribble from her skin, but absolutely spouted, like every pore in her voluminous undersole flesh contained its own faucet. The mawkish aged-cheddar moist-cowhide flavor infected every particle of air, liquid, and solid alike, succulently flowing over and through the shrunken creature with more of that repulsive yet bodily-necessarily elixir of Bri’s foot fluids than he could drink even in whole weeks of continuous bingeing. And while Cody trusted now that his body was protected against blunt-force trauma, he wasn’t positive the same could be said about drowning, which was a real concern once the soupy leather-fouled perspiration really started to collect and slosh about around him at-pace with Bri’s graceful yet vigorous moves.

In the darkest way possible, it was also lucky that the giantess was sweating so hard on top of her unnoticed captive, because the rapidfire stepping, grinding, and heel-pivoting choreography involved in tonight’s practice over the course of an infinite hour would’ve otherwise depleted Cody of his lifeforce so completely that he would’ve been left a fidgeting comatose husk of himself by the end, if not for the acrid shoe-pooling sea of sour seepage served up for his drinking displeasure. Even while those gag-reflexive swallows from Bri’s geysers of dance-earned perspiration kept him alive and somehow mostly-conscious, and the lost transmogrifier’s lasting effects prevented him from lethally popping like a mosquito as he was clomped upon over three thousand times in the course of one hour, Cody had never endured anything like this before. Being inside Bri’s shoes while she danced was pure-and-simple torment of a medieval order, more taxing than anything he ever could’ve imagined being put through, even that first time he uncomfortably noticed what the side-effects of his original shrinkage by Kayla had done to his body’s nourishment requirements. This took the cake.

Having likely entered some kind of fugue state by the end of Bri’s practice, which was at least preferable to a death by heavy-soled sweat-clogged energy-sucking dissolution, Cody regained full awareness when he noticed that the giantess was no longer stomping on him with musically-guided intent, and had in fact slowed down enough to untie her shoe. Which meant they were home again, and his chance was coming. Reinvigorated by the knowledge that he was finally about to get out of this hauntingly-hot leather dance shoe and the scummy lint-salted sea gathered within, and even more importantly get away from Bri’s monstrously-huge bare foot once and for all, he primed to rip himself free as soon as she’d airlifted him back to the outside world. Now stocked up on a vomit-inspiring quantity of her freshest sweat, Cody was charged back up, and ready to conclude this worsening nightmare.

But then Bri tugged her foot out of the shoe without any fanfare, and in a daze, the oblivious giantess’s micro-shrinker shoe inmate was left still lying inside the vacated hull. He hadn’t gone with her; his body didn’t stick any longer. Sent into another hysterical spiral, Cody leapt up and raced across the mushy insole wasteland where he’d just been marooned inside Bri’s now-empty shoe, as if physics itself would realize a mistake was made and take him out too. He wasn’t going anywhere, though, and with petrifying alarm, he realized why. The measure of foot sweat splashing around the well of her footwear was so excessive that it had actually become a slippery butter-like lubricant between Cody’s grain-height frame and the sky of naked sole he’d previously clung onto against his will with the greatest ease. Now, disturbing as it was to think about, the little thing would’ve given anything to be stepped on, flattened, and unknowingly seized by Bri’s foot just one more time, if only for long enough to escape. It was too late, however, as the girl had already mindlessly toe-nudged both those toasty sweat-encrusting shoes out of sight – and would have no need to wear them again for another seven whole days.

Time blurred together and then outright lost all meaning for Cody. As the days passed, even though he could hear distant voices and feel occasional floor vibrations from what might as well have been half a world away while the family obliviously lived their ordinary lives with no clue of what had happened or where he was, the inside of Bri’s dance shoe eventually felt like a separate sub-dimension of his reality, with no way out and no discernible end to his brain-draining time of solitary confinement. On the bleakest possible bright side, the place he’d been unknowingly marooned for a week by the footwear’s owner just so happened to be fertile with the exact substances he was now required to eat and drink for survival. Or at least that was the case for the first half of the week. Despite how infinite the stewed sea of perspiration and bountiful the crop of chewy stench-plump toejam clusters seemed while Bri was actually last wearing the shoe to dance, distending time and open air – and Cody’s gradual feelings of starvation – greatly diminished what should’ve been a hearty buffet for him. Those sweat puddles dried and soaked down into the leatherbound insole, robbing him of easy pickings, and all the dirty scum scraped clean from the giantess’s bare sole flesh hardened into mossy concretions across the vessel’s interior. Until the micro-sufferer eventually found he had to forage and hunt across the vacant smelly desert of the shoe just to have enough nutrition for the next sickening search.

By the start of the seventh day, though in Cody’s mind it could’ve been mere hours or several months since he was unwittingly abandoned in here by Bri’s foot, he had no choice but to crawl on all fours, too tired and dehydrated to stand upright, while gathering the scant disgusting sustenance which remained available. No more toe-crevice grime or lint chunks could be found, at least not close enough to the ground that he had a chance of harvesting them for food. So Cody was reduced to pitifully gnawing and sucking from the sunken imprint-ravaged insole itself, which stunk richly of Bri’s energetic dance odor but was essentially bone-dry now, just to gather a few precious drops of her sweat which still tasted every bit as offensively sour going down, no matter how badly his bodily systems needed it.