The Great Awakening (Chapter 2)

Though physically Lilly felt no different, internally she felt a surge of omnipotence, and thus she took her time with the first stride at her new colossal height. She arched her left shoe off the ground, rolling weight up from the heel of her sneaker to the ball of her foot and finally her toes, leaving a zig-zagging tread pattern stamped firmly into the land behind as it crested away. When she did peel her entire shoe off the cracked ground to step, it was with ponderous yet determined intent, the immense shape of her sneaker and her astronomic bare leg arcing over three miles of terrain in the span of just over ten achingly slow seconds. Even tethered to the ground still by one leg, Lilly felt both an airborne sensation of weightlessness, and at the same time, the effect of being the largest and heaviest living thing to ever exist. When her foot met the ground again, heel-first, the treads gradually tramping back into place, she felt an almost negligible shudder rippling out from under her oncoming weight.

            Goose bumps prickled over most of her skin. Certainly Lilly hadn’t forgotten how to walk, but there was no denying either that she still needed a moment’s pause to recalibrate to her unfathomably prodigious body and its accompanying multi-billion-pound strength. Simultaneously, the first step felt just as innocuous and instinctive as any she’d ever taken in her life, and yet also significant, charged with momentum, in a way she couldn’t quite put into words. Like her every move, from the swing of a leg to the curl of a finger, possessed the same fortitude as heavenly bodies orbiting the sun.

            But one step was all it took to find her confidence, and then Lilly had forgotten what it ever felt like to walk around at anything less than fifty-thousand feet tall. The opposite foot, still resting over the crumbled remains of the campsite beside the mountain, lifted from the ground, lingering a shorter time in midair, though nonetheless Lilly savored the same tickle of swift high-altitude winds sweeping her skin. Her sneaker impacted the earth beside its mate, sending out another meager tremor, and she went still as a monument again. It was just one three-and-a-half-mile-long stride, but likely the most important of Lilly’s life yet. She planted both hands on her hips, took a deep breath, and set off for the shining gray pastiche of micro-cities spread among the forested carpets like spilled liquid concrete.

            In just that single first stride, the suburban and metropolitan sprawl came much closer in the giantess’s view, near enough almost that Lilly could begin to spot differentiation in the hue and elevation of the cities’ texture. Another two steps dramatically improved the sight again. Though of course the squares of civilization were far too puny and tightly-packed for her to see anything so large as even a skyscraper, let alone individual city blocks or, God forbid, cars and people. Still, she was pleased to realize certain detail was visible from this distance, like the thin blue threads of rivers, and other smaller civilized districts sprinkled among the largely-verdant earth that weren’t visible until Lilly was standing right above them.

            These were the first lands that Lilly reached made of anything other than abundant woods and mountainous clutter, and she took great delight in watching the adorably tiny manmade architecture tremble when she set her foot down for another step. Even while standing literally right over these towns, Lilly couldn’t quite make out individual houses or buildings; seeing all these spread-out cities at once, it felt more like staring down at a computer microchip in all its colorful complexity, indistinguishable aside from the fact that it was indeed a little mosaic. With her sneakers spread miles apart, the girl halted before stepping up fully to the plate, hunching slightly to better take in her unique vantage. She guessed these to be the districts on the far outskirts of Chicago, neighborhoods and semi-rural communities shrouded mostly by forest, relative to Lilly’s expansive vision. This wasn’t her ultimate destination, though, as the surely intricate and densely-populated largest city in the state was what truly magnetized the titanic girl to keep strolling.

            Still, not wanting to pass up her first reunion with humanity post-growth, Lilly cautiously lifted her trailing sneaker off the forest floor and brought it slowly, almost balletically, up to the line of lesser cities. This foot Lilly purposefully set down harder than the other, as she’d been essentially tiptoeing up to this point, like she was walking on eggshells. But no more. When the rubber sole of her pure-white sneaker hit the earth with an audible thud, the effect was instantaneous; every complicated microcosm of suburban districts for two miles in every compass direction trembled all at once, as though the ground was a rug Lilly had waved in a ripple-pattern to shake out the dust.

            Ironically, that was exactly what happened, when a thin earthen smoke cloud puffed up from the cracked ground, the nigh-invisible neighborhoods toppling together like thrown dice, though of course Lilly could detect little more than the fact that, by her scale, there was a bit of minor chaos taking place. It required little more effort for her than disturbing a pile of loose pebbles, which she’d done hundreds of times yesterday while hiking in the woods. Yet like her first step as a giantess, Lilly comprehended immediately what made this step different and important from her usual. Just as an ordinary stride held great significance for her now, the falling weight of her technically thin, almost-willowy body held terrifying sway over all structures around it. Well, probably terrifying for the people below, at least. Lilly, for her part, was just satisfied.

            Though reluctant to leave the site of her preliminary contact with mankind as a titaness, the girl proceeded to walk right over the area she’d just ravaged with a single half-hearted stomp, but not before intentionally letting the rounded toe of her sneaker drag through the ground, carving up the smote suburbs among the mud.

            Similar towns pockmarked the landscape ahead, uniting slowly into larger spans of citified ground. Lilly trudged through these without stopping, as she was too excited to set foot in central Chicago, but was still keenly aware of the distinction of the ground being crushed into two-dimensional canyons below her feet. While stepping on the trees and even mountains was soft and spongy, more like walking on a sandy beach, quashing the beige-and-silver squares of modern civilization produced a nettlesome crunch underfoot. More akin to stepping on short-bladed grass made of cheap plastic. Even if Lilly couldn’t hear the sound from here or divine the no-doubt highly tactile experience of it via skin due to wearing shoes, the contrast between walking on nature and civility was irrefutable, and the giantess loved it.

            Lilly’s love of travel had provided her enough geographic expertise to notice when Chicago proper finally appeared in her view, just a few brief nearly-four-mile steps later. Gleeful, she stopped at the outer edge of the city, hunching over with her hands on her knees for a better look. The comparative puddle of Lake Michigan lay alongside the city, with the shoreline clocking in at only two and a half times the length of Lilly’s body. Unlike the samples of country towns she’d both lunged over and used as stepping stones already, which appeared to the giantess roughly the same ground-level height as the diminutive trees, instantly she could make out the difference in this contemporary metropolis.

            For the first time this morning, Lilly could see actual buildings, reaching cutely off the ground at heights about the length of her fingernails. The tallest structures, however, in the downtown district rose plenty high enough to distinguish even from one another, like a patch of silvery short-stemmed flowers cloistered proudly together. Those glass-and-stone structures represented decades of labor, billions of dollars, and thousands of lives to create, and yet to Lilly, they looked no more significant than pieces of pencil lead lined in rows and columns.

            More eager than ever to explore and perhaps even touch the fascinating life below, the girl made herself slow her pace on the approach, wanting to spot and enjoy every detail she possibly could, given she was staring down at the place from ten miles in the sky. It would be nice, she decided, to study the city in all its remaining splendor, because she had a feeling by the time she’d strolled across, little of it would still be recognizable. Her sneaker twisted against the earth with a gravelly chew, pivoting on her heel, and then Lilly lifted her shoe again, bending one muscle in her foot at a time for take-off.