Big Time Espionage (Chapter 1)

This was supposed to be just another routine mission for the six seasoned spies. Their leader, going by the callsign Alpha, had taken point on no less than seventy-four of these excursions now, traveling all around the galaxy and infiltrating the unassuming facilities of whatever extraterrestrial corporation had become the new targets of his employers. Being members of a species that on average only stood at a quarter inch tall, there were certain unexpected advantages that came with being so small and easily missed. With only occasional minor exceptions, all of those missions had gone off without a hitch for Alpha and his team, no matter what freakish psychedelic surroundings or bizarre mountain-high creatures got in their way. Today they were breaking into a site on the Xartania system, run by a breed of humanoid that shared a great deal in common with the spies – the main differences being the Xartanians’ natural hair colors tended toward bold rainbow hues, their slightly pointier ears, their anatomy which apparently excreted certain unidentified but non-toxic pheromones, plus the fact that they towered obscenely over the quarter-inch invaders like giants.

            Yet here Alpha and his cohorts stood, still unnoticed, with just one room left to bypass before they reached the facility’s primary server to steal every secret the company had, and none of them had budged for going on sixty seconds now, as they hid in the floorbound shadow of a violet-ponytailed giantess totally oblivious to their presence. She was working merrily away at her desk, dancing her fingers through holographic messages and humming a jaunty techno-inspired tune under her breath. While beneath the seat, both her monumental feet – clad in glossy purple flats that matched the hue of her hair – were planted imposingly in the spies’ intended path. Ordinarily, such an obstacle would’ve been little more than a distraction for the experienced team before they got on with their job and then called for extraction, while these titans above were none the wiser.

Just before they could advance, however, her left foot innocently dipped upward, popping her heel away from the well-loved violent vessel’s backend with a moist-sounding plock of suction. Now, the front half of her foot remained pinned down upon the shadowy insole within, and the back arched steeply from the opening, revealing a pale-pinkish slab of her gigantic sole rife with squiggled flesh wrinkles almost to the point of bath time pruniness. Her skin shone luminously from a sheen of workday perspiration as if she’d smeared her entire foot through a puddle of cooking oil before cramming it inside her shoe, and the team could spot miniscule flecks of floor grit, fabric jam, and earthy grains all stuck across the terrain of her skin via repeated stamping. All of them stood inexplicably transfixed by that view, mid-stride as if frozen in time. In the back of his mind, Alpha felt the same instincts on high alert like they’d suddenly crossed paths with a heavily-armed tank taking aim at them, even though it was only a much-taller woman’s half-unsheathed foot they were staring down, and a blissfully unaware woman’s foot at that. His atmospheric sensor was picking up a mild concentration of that non-toxic pheromone unique to the Xartanians, but nothing that seemed worrisome. Knowing how ridiculous it was to be struck dumb by such a meaningless hindrance, he silently directed the team to forge ahead despite their shared pause – a brash lack of caution he wouldn’t normally have shown, but unbeknownst to him and the rest of his comrades, both the equally unwitting giantess’s feet had already begun to work that biochemical alien magic on them all.

The six split up into two trios then, with three tiptoeing stealthily in front of her shoes and three behind. Alpha’s sensor was now picking up a very dense pheromonal presence in the air, thick enough that it could’ve been classified as life-threatening pollution if only it consisted of different elements, but he did his best to ignore it. All of them, however, could smell that balmy aura swirling about the giantess’s shoes in a pungent immovable cloud before they even got within a yard of her, though Beta and Charlie were the first to actually acknowledge it openly as they followed their team leader behind her footwear. Right as their paths aligned with that popped-up heel, putting them in almost-tangible proximity to that dark wedge of open space between her well-trampled flat and half-hovering foot, their knees shuddered and they looked to one another with uncomfortable grimaces.

Tough as they usually were, able to keep a stiff upper lip while encountering all manner of repulsive otherworldly sights and odors on their other secret missions, Beta and Charlie stopped dead in their tracks and went pallid from the sheer ripeness of that squalid mist steaming like refuse from a factory smokestack. Never in their lives, nor any of the team’s lives, had they ingested such a sharply acrid salt-entwined strain of body musk as this. It was truly profound, combining flavors that were at least semi-recognizable in smaller doses such as mildewy used laundry and post-exertion pore spice, along with a few other zests of exotic ultra-sour fruits and vinegary laboratory chemicals that made it impossible to know whether they were present due to the giantess’s alien origin, or simply because her feet stunk that extremely. Whatever the reason for this dank cornucopia of airborne raunch, the absolute disgust and sensory overload was enough to paralyze the duo in place, with their legs still dizzily wobbling as they verged on a coughing fit.

Alpha had only just managed to power his way past that warm and potently malodorous spot where the giantess’s heel was divorced from her flat, semi-drunkenly marching beyond it even while the smell penetrated his lungs just as keenly as his teammates’ own. Realizing the other two broken rank, he pivoted around and repeated his order, to no avail. Meanwhile in front of her shoes, the trio of Delta, Echo, and Foxtrot held out in their willpower for a little longer, since at least they hadn’t crept mere inches away from the toasty backend opening of the giantess’s shoe, where a possibly-endless supply of vile tangy atmosphere was now pouring out like the antithesis of dry ice. As it turned out, however, that pheromonal essence was powerful enough to punch clear through the woman’s weathered filth-dampened purple footwear. As a result, their paces slowed as well, particularly as they passed in front of the toe sections of those barge-sized flats and saw the hints of bulges rising from inside as she absentmindedly scrunched and splayed her digits inside those cramped quarters. Invisible fissures of musty flavor were squeezed from between those toes like tiny underground vent eruptions and then fumed through the shoe’s permeable shell.

A palpable fog of fleshly saltwater, acerbic and briny as could be, clotted hazily around Delta, Echo, and Foxtrot with the same naturally predatory purpose as a Venus flytrap. That smell folded them into itself, sticking to them and turning warmer the longer they stayed in proximity to the still-busily unaware giantess’s feet, and soon the threesome were just as caught in place as their teammates who’d split off and traveled behind the flats instead. Alpha saw this, and urgently sent out a telecom to all five of his ordinarily obedient and well-trained peers telling them to keep moving ahead, but a flash grenade might as well have gone off inside all of their skulls. The five, and soon Alpha as well, were locked dreamily in place, repugnantly sucking down whiff after whiff of the violet-haired titaness’s ruggedly salt-juicy underfoot effluvium. None of them had ever been so unappetized or so offended by a single smell in all their careers spent hopping across alien worlds, yet they couldn’t make themselves flee its overpowering influence. The riptide of her foot scent may not have been “toxic” in the scientific sense, but it was more than a little bit intoxicating.

What’s more, this at-first minor slip-up in the team’s usual professionalism was about to descend into a full-blown catastrophe.