On Pointe (Chapter 4)

River paused, then, just as she’d been instructed, giving the others time to react. As much as the three miniature actresses were canonically meant to be giddily thrilled at the arrival of their prodigious idol, they were having more trouble getting into character than their giantess lead. They were still struggling for words, anxiously trembling and backpedaling from the rooftop’s precipice, as they craned their necks all the way back to take in River’s countenance dipping just low enough into their ground-bound orbit that her face reentered focus for them. The brunette’s serenely pretty expression was gobsmackingly vast – not merely in the echelon of ‘humongous’ that could’ve fit on a jumbo-tron or metropolitan billboard, but instead like someone had projected a hyper-lifelike miles-high hologram over the city that successfully blotted out the entire sky. Though of course River was all too real. Her voice, as well, even whispered at first, resonated with deafening imminence through the buildings every bit as much as her reserved footsteps, and that was before she’d started raising her volume for dramatic effect.

“Hey. Answer her. Just pretend she can hear you,” Emilia prompted at a hush, when the other three were still too overwhelmed to do anything but gawk and go jelly-kneed.

“Y-Yes! Goddess!” Melanie elatedly shouted, with her hands raised overhead, despite her fears. This seemed to help the other two snap out of their own silent gaping, as Naomi and Jade also contributed praise:

“Yes, Goddess. You could crush us, because we’re nothing compared to you. But… please… don’t do that. All we want is to be your servants. We only exist to please you.”

“I’m sorry our city’s not enough for you, Goddess, but I promise we’ll still do our best to make you happy!”

“Please, Goddess. W-Won’t you bless us, like you promised?”

“Let us honor you and your feet, Goddess. You deserve it!”

“May we see them, Goddess? Your beautiful… super-humongous… dirty, sweaty, s-smelly, powerful feet?”

Emilia send a message to River’s phone, then, causing it to buzz in her pocket and prompting her to move on. The giantess cocked her head at her borderline-invisibly tiny subjects, pompously raising her chin and planting her hands on her hips. At last, she gave them her answer by slipping out of her shoes, one by one. This took some mild prying due to the sweaty suction keeping her feet adhered to the no-doubt sticky interior walls via trickly fog, and the shrunken ballerinas watched this violent unveiling with due awe and mounting nerves.

Especially once River’s size-12s were nakedly brought into the light, slapping down upon the studio floor with a pair of slightly-damp concussions, on either side of her now-vacant flats. Just as the foursome were forced to view the beautiful grotesquery of the colossal dancer’s footwear in exquisitely squelchy detail, they now beheld the same detail for her feet themselves – each of which was larger on its own than their entire model city. Once again, even from halfway across town, each anatomic facet of River’s wiggly-toed appendages was made plain as though her shrunken peers were observing them through a telescope. Skin cells, dimple lines, complexion differences, and shines beaming off flesh and nail alike all combined into a massive landscape collage of feminine sweat-drizzled physiology. Wherever they stared, there seemed to be something in motion, be it a toe muscularly flexing and rearing up with strength that could’ve crunched dozens of buildings to powder, or a single crease in her skin softly deepening as her soles squeakily fought against the friction of the wet-printed ground.

Though still no part of this surreal and jaw-dropping sight, as shocking as it was, could compare to the sense-conquering aplomb of the aromatic essence that rapidly washed over the whole city within seconds of River’s de-shoeing like a dirty bomb’s toxic payload. It took a few seconds after her feet emerged for the unfurling smog to truly wreathe the whole city, but once it was set in motion, all four of her shrunken audience could perceive that sweltering riptide of grungy undersole atmosphere rushing through the city, from the street level up to the highest rooftops like theirs, which of course was only a matter of inches off the ground. It instantly raised the temperature by what felt like thirty degrees, causing the puny actresses to gasp and flinch as if they’d stood too close to an oven when the doors suddenly burst open to expel roasting fumes. Though there was hardly time to register the discomfort of the heat before the flavor of that altered aura took its toll. Being lifelong dedicated ballet dancers, everyone in this room was well-familiar with exactly how offensively their feet could potentially stink, both their own and those of their peers. And after so many routines and shows together, they had almost numbed themselves to the fouler post-practice stenches that inevitably came creeping from the mouths of spent pointe shoes, still misshapen and moist from a severe hours-long beating across the studio floor.

Yet those countless years of their practice and olfactory inoculation were rendered utterly pointless in a single instant, all thanks to the shrunken crew’s pitiful almost-immeasurable smallness and the accompanying vulnerability, as that unforgiving waft from River’s warm liberated feet assaulted them all simultaneously in a noxious practically-tangible cloud of pure ripe pore-brine distillate. It was absolutely wretched. The smell was ridiculously pungent, sharp and acidic like a straight shot of the sourest pickled saline, yet also formidably caustic, as if they’d stuck a dropper of pepper capsaicin up their nostrils at once and inhaled as hard as they could. None of the four, even including Emilia who was the most gung-ho about this wild scheme, had ever ingested any odor in even the same category of strength as this. Instantly, the three little dancers-turned-fetish-amateurs collapsed to their haunches, rasping and retching and shaking from the sheer repulsion of it. Yet impressively, perhaps out of intense worry that they might have to do this again rather than dedication to the craft, they managed to fight through that boggy weaponized mustiness. On their knees, the trio wrestled their reactions just under control enough that they could pass off their continued chagrin and nausea as hallowed reverence for their visiting goddess in front of Emilia’s camera, and prayerfully held their arms overhead in devotion to River, shouting:

“Thank you, Goddess!”

“They s-smell perfect! Perfect just like you!”

“We only l-live to serve you!”

“P-Please, give us… more?”

River’s phone buzzed again, prompting her to put on an uncharacteristically condescending twinkle-eyed smile that, fake or not, made her tiny costars feel genuinely belittled all the same as she stared down upon them and their squishable city with the same respect she might pay to a swarm of gnats. Then she knelt lower, reaching out with both hands as if she meant to clap the town between her palms. Melanie, Naomi, and Jade all flinched, though admirably still maintained their worshipful postures. It turned out River wasn’t reaching for the city itself, however. Instead, she grabbed ahold of her abandoned flats, picked them up, and folded them in toward either length of the model. There, she balanced her shoes delicately on their sides, with the empty mouths aimed squarely for the downtown sprawl. At once, the shadows of her footwear reached across the city, forming an imposing see-through perspiration-smeared canyon, as the width of her flats beat out the size of any building below.