Technology was the lifeblood of Lilliput. Technology helped the inch-tall Lilliputians build their dense, but somehow still sprawling cities. Technology kept them safe in a world they shared with their 400-foot-tall neighbors known as Gulliverians. And technology, specifically portal technology, had allowed the miniscule people of Lilliput to colonize not only the seemingly vast reaches of their world, but now other worlds as well.
A specialized team of Lilliputian multiverse explorers first encountered the world of Brobdingnag over 20 years ago. At first no one believed the team’s tales of a god-like 5-mile-tall race of people who looked just like them. A race of people who dwarfed even the massive Gulliverians boggled the mind. And exploration of this daunting world had its challenges – one recon team, finding themselves stranded on a Brobdingnagian park bench, were summarily and unceremoniously wiped out when a passing runner sat down to tie her shoe. But eventually Lilliputian perseverance and ingenuity won out, communication was established, and now a brisk trade between the two worlds enriched both. In particular, Lilliputian knowledge workers, advanced in education and cheap to house, served as the backbone for many a Brob corporation. Thousands of Lilliputians made the commute each day by portal to Brobdingnag, safe in the knowledge that, as ever, their advanced technology would protect them.
John was one of those many multiversal commuters. Living in the bustling, 20 million strong metropolis of Concordia City, he waited his turn to walk through one of the Central Ave portals to a cushy accounting gig on the other side. Yet despite having worked there for nearly 5 years now, he had never actually seen a Brobdingnagian in person. For obvious safety reasons, Lillies were not allowed to interact directly with their Brobby co-workers, and were instead housed in a hermetically sealed office space where they interacted solely via video chat. And from the neck up, Brobbies looked like anyone else.
None of this, however, was on John’s mind as he waited his turn through the portal. Instead he was looking forward to the weekend, where a third date with a beautiful girl he’d met via dating app awaited. Yes, it was early, but this could really be the one! he thought excitedly.
The line was moving slowly as always, and just as his daily frustration with the crawl was beginning to mount, a blinding flash, seemingly emanating from the portal, blinded John and his fellow commuters, causing many to cry out in surprise. Then, just as suddenly as it appeared, the flash was gone, leaving John and others to blink away the lingering after-images. As their vision cleared, confusion took over. Nothing outward had changed, but the portals, once glowing with their otherworldly green energy were dark.
Before panic could set in, a calming, official-sounding female voice on the PA system reassured the crowds that this was merely a technical glitch – one that would be resolved shortly. It was as the message began to repeat that the earthquakes started.
At a convenience store on the edge of Concordia City, Luke pondered not for the first time how much he hated his job. For sure, it was cheaper living out here in the boonies, and the job was a steady paycheck, but it was so boring!
Concordia City’s borders were defined by what everyone referred to as “The Boundary.” A thousand-foot-tall energy barrier whose spindly generator towers and hazy blue energy bisected the landscape as you looked towards the desert coast and away from the ocean on the other side of the city. The Boundary was an eyesore, but a necessary one. Unclimbable, supposedly impenetrable and capable of fully enclosing the city in a dome of powerful energy, it kept out anything (primarily the ever-dangerous Gulliverians) that might wish to harm the tiny occupants of Concordia City. And as the city grew, The Boundary shifted outward into the desert surroundings, the movement itself a marker of Lilliputian progress.
Yet as one might expect, not many wished to live directly in the shadow of the Boundary. The low hum of its energy was incessant, and the dim blue glow was known to disturb inhabitants’ sleep. So it was left to the poorest of Concordia City -- those like Luke himself -- to populate these outer reaches.
With no customers in sight, Luke jostled himself from his daily stupor to retrieve a mop from the closet and finally clean up that spilled Slurpee over on aisle three. It was then that through the windows, overpowering even the ever-present glow of the Boundary he saw the flash.
It was startlingly bright, green energy filling the small space of the store and seeming to come from everywhere all at once. And then just as quickly as it happened, it disappeared.
Luke abandoned his mop, and quick-stepped to the front door to see what possibly could’ve caused this unsettling anomaly.
Stepping outside into the warm, summer morning air, he saw others from the shops along his patch of ring road doing the same. They looked westward towards the Boundary, shading their eyes to try to see the root of all the disturbance through a cloud of dust that had kicked up in the desert scrub brush outside the city.
As the dust cleared, a shocking sight was revealed. Miles outside the city, the clear shape of what appeared to be a pair of immense women’s sandals dominated the landscape. Rough brown leather formed a wall nearly two thousand feet wide sitting atop a chunky rubber-looking tread of dark black and towering more than five hundred feet in the air. Wide leather straps stretched even further up, arcing over the monstrous footwear and ending in metal buckles the size of houses. But it was what was encased in this colossal footwear that truly set the curious onlookers at wit’s end. Five cheerfully wiggling, white-painted toes sat atop the leather wall, each the height of a large hill. These were in turn attached to a foot that could swallow a small town, and as they craned their necks to look up and up, they saw a bare ankle adorned with a beaded anklet that could overtop their highest skyscrapers and a vast plain of smooth, fair skin and lightly muscled leg leading up into a cute pair of tight jean shorts. Looking even further into the air, they could just make out a small patch of toned torso revealed by a tight white sleeveless top straining to contain a pair of breasts the size of mountains. And finally peering over the shelf of those impressive endowments, blued and distorted by the distance, a face. Youthful, undeniably beautiful, with curious green eyes, and framed by a mess of long auburn hair, it gazed down upon their fair city.
For a long moment, silence reigned over the ring road onlookers and seemingly the city itself. No one knew how to react to such a presence. Even for a people used to seeing giant Gulliverans the size of skyscrapers, this was something else. A Gulliverian, for all their size, couldn’t even reach the lip of this girl’s sandal!
“What just happened?” the crack of her powerful voice split the heavens, raining down on the city at a borderline painful volume, only moderated by distance. Her words rumbled like thunder, but somehow retained their feminine lilt under the avalanche of sound.
She stirred, biting her lower lip anxiously, and twisting at the torso to look behind her, seemingly searching for the way she had come, and finding only open desert air.
As she did so a colossal sandaled foot shifted, lifting at the heel, the unconscious movements of a girl lost in thought.
To Luke and his compatriots, though, it was as if the landscape itself was shifting. Despite being miles from the city, they felt as much as saw her casual movements. The mighty heel uprooting itself caused tremors in the unsteady ground, and as her weight shifted to her toes, the thick tread of her sandal sunk heavily into the soft earth, shaking things further, rending the ground around it, and causing a deafening roar of compacted dirt as she ground the desert clay underfoot.
“What. The. Actual. Fuck,” she muttered in what for her was likely an undertone, but was heard clearly across the entire region. She sounded annoyed. Concordia’s anxiety doubled.
Then she began to move.
She covered the four-plus-mile distance to Concordia City in two apocalyptic strides.
Luke and the other onlookers watched shell-shocked as she prepared to take her first step towards them, the defined muscles in her long legs standing out as she tensed, her colossal toes lifting and that mile-long sandal raising impossibly high in the air, which for her just a normal stride. They could hear the air rushing as it was cut apart by something so large moving so fast, and they could hear the creak of massive leather straps straining against the incalculable forces of her simple step. The wait for her footfall seemed interminable, her colossal ped hanging like a human Sword of Damocles, but in reality it was likely only a fraction of second. Her heel hit first, the impact throwing Luke and everyone in the vicinity to the ground as a quake ripped through the border area. It was nothing, though, compared to the impact of the rest of her sole as she completed her step. The sound of her footfall was deafening, the booming thud rattling windows across the city. Near the Boundary, the massive quake of her step shook the earth violently, pinning everyone to the ground as the resulting shockwave hammered against the Boundary forcefield and dust flew up in huge plumes, driven by the displaced air. The glass in the windows behind Luke cracked with the force of it and as he huddled on the ground he could see spidery fractures forming in the concrete walls of his store.
She seemed to pause after that first step. Perhaps she was savoring the violence of it? Luke and others struggled to their feet, brushing dust from faces and clothes, wondering why the Boundary shields hadn’t been fully raised, and preparing to make a break for it, as if they could outpace her miles-long stride. But before anyone could move a muscle she began to step forward again.
Luke dove behind the store walls, hoping their meager strength would save him. Peering around the corner, he watched her massive foot easily clear the Boundary field less than a mile down the road. Its previously impenetrable height a mere couple inches on her scale, it offered no impediment to her casual stride. He noticed for the first time the clods of desert dirt and other detritus raining from her sandal’s tread like bombs. Boulders the size of cars dislodged and fell from the sky as she passed. He saw her shadow spread over the vast area of her footfall throwing trees and road into darkness. And then the inevitable impact. Without the Boundary to buffer, the devastation was catastrophic. The ground heaved, throwing Luke five feet into the air and dropping him painfully to the ground. The shockwave of her footfall tore through the area and he saw cars, road signs, and people flung like discarded toys down the road by the force of it. He heard every window in the area shatter and watched the weaker structures in the strip malls nearby simply collapse from the violence of it all. Saved only by the thin layer of concrete between him and the titaness he cowered, covering his head with his hands and groaning from ribs bruised on his rough landing.
And still she wasn’t done. Finally, the city-wide alarm sounded as she brought her massive right foot to join its partner with equal devastation, Luke now crying out in fear and pain as rubble and debris was flung through the air around him. The ground heaved yet again, and the store roof behind him collapsed with a loud crash. The Boundary shields began to raise, but it was too late as this second step crushed a generator tower beneath her colossal heel, the titanium and steel compacting like tinfoil, offering no resistance at all as she stepped down. The Boundary, that technological marvel and safeguard against all threats to Lilliput, flickered once, twice and went out.
She paused again, though from her impassive expression it was unclear whether she even noticed the impact she was having on the area, or if she did, whether she cared at all. Luke lay panting on his back, his head bleeding from flying debris his ankle and arm likely broken from the repeated thrashing against the ground. From his prone position he stared up at her, and in the fog of pain and shock he admired absently the youthful beauty in that distant face, the sensuousness of her lithe, athletic form and the overwhelming awesomeness of those well-placed curves.
He saw her smirk faintly, and then she was dropping like a mountain coming to rest -- miles long legs bending, knees extending. Though she was almost a mile away, one knee easily overtopped the entire border area as it fell, her smooth shin getting closer and closer until Luke felt like he could reach out and touch it. In a daze, he started to reach one bloodied hand up…and then blackness.
Ava knelt carefully at the outskirts of what she knew to be a Lilliputian city, but to her looked like a variegated, uneven grid bordering the ocean, maybe 50 feet across.
Putting on her most serious expression, she gazed down on the tiny masses she knew to be beneath her, sighed audibly, and said, “OK, tiny peeps, we need to talk.”