Chapter 4: Touchpoint

“You know,”, said Lachelle as she stomped along the city. “It always feels weird to step on Lilli things barefoot.”

“Unless I’m mistaken, and I’m not, I recall you saying you liked it.”, said Himari.

“Well, that doesn’t mean it’s not weird.”, replied Lachelle.

Himari said nothing, but she broke her professional composure ever so slightly with a smirk no one saw.

Lachelle’s walk came to a stop shortly after. She felt the squish of several hundred Lilliputians beneath her toes, and thought nothing of it. Then, she crouched down to get a closer look at the Lilliadventures HQ. Even crouching down, she towered over the structure by well over a mile.

“Ok.”, she began. “We’re here.”

“Yes, we are.”, said Himari. “But it seems you didn’t notice: they have security staff down there.”

“They do?”

“Yes, they’ve been shooting at you for awhile now. I suppose you couldn’t feel it.”

Lachelle shifted forward in her squat, arms hanging relaxed over her knees, with her fingers dangling precariously over the ground by her toes. She squinted real hard and, sure enough, could just barely make out a cluster of specks.

Since each security staff member wore matching black suits, the defensive formation of them appeared as a clump of black dots, basically, altogether no bigger than her smallest toe.

“No, I didn’t feel them. It’d be hard to feel something like that.”

Indeed, even with the terrified silence from the Lilliputian executives below her and past those security specks, she could just barely, if even, make out the sounds of their tiny sidearms going off.

“I can imagine, but they need to be dealt with. Would you please...”, said Himari.

“But, if I do it isn’t it a little heavy-handed? We don’t want to hurt the asset. That building looks pretty expensive, even I can see that.”

“You’re a professional, Lachelle. Just lick them up or something. Quick, precise, and efficient. Safer than snuffing them out with a finger, too.”

“Won’t that leave a bit of saliva?”

“Yes, but in the courtyard only. Once the asset is secure back at Oshie Corp, it’ll be thoroughly cleaned by staff. They must be disposed of, and I’ll deduct their numbers from the final employee count. Though they can’t hurt us, I need to go down there, and when I do I don’t want their armaments to scuff or stain any of my clothes.”

“I’ll have to move real close, which means I need to stretch myself out into the city a bit. That’s a lot of damage to cause.”, said Lachelle.

“It’ll be cheaper than my dry cleaning.”, said Himari.

“Understood.”

Lachelle moved from her squatting position to a laying one: with catastrophic results. The bottom of her palms slammed into the ground just before the courtyard. The wrinkles of one such palm hung over the Lilliputian executives and their security staff. Thankfully, they were angled so as to not crush them in the few seconds before she slid her hands back and lowered them flat to the ground. In the process, her pinky finger flattened some guard posts on the outside of the courtyard fence.

That done, Lachelle stretched out those long legs of hers back into the city. So much previously unflattened metropolis-matter got caught up by her feet as they moved backed. Like unstoppable walls, megalithic bulldozers, her soles barreled into the buildings that survived contact with her toes. Said toes had dug into the city’s foundation, and they left deep trenches as those long dark legs stretched out much as they could.

There was no resistance from the city. The Brobdingnagian's toes and the tops of her feet and legs just tore through all those buildings and concrete like butter.

The only warning the lawyers had came from Himari shortly before the movement began. That area was clear, mostly, but still some of the Gulliverian lawyers on Oshie Corp payroll broke into sudden sprints to dodge the pillar-like limbs as they just extended out to flatten block after block around them.

All made it out safely, but there was at least one close call. Of course, any Lilliputians or buildings in the way broke beneath or against those 500ft bodies that moved with such a sudden haste. More blood stains abounded beneath designer Gulliverian shoes.

Lachelle wasn’t quite finished with her casually apocalyptic repositioning. With her legs stretched out, she lowered her body so that her bosom and abdomen settled atop the city. A few ten-thousand Lilliputians, lucky thus far, met their doom under the cloth of her black skirt or the flowing white fabric of her blouse. A single button from the blouse laid waste to a couple side-by-side company headquarters. Their very roofs broke against the sturdy little fastener of a Brobdingnagian woman’s top.

It wasn’t the most professional position to be in, admittedly. What business woman would lie on the ground? One that needed to, and Lachelle held the opinion that doing one’s job was more professional than not doing it, no matter how it looked.

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The executives watched in horror as the predicted uselessness of their security staff played out before them. What shots managed to reach the Brobdingnagian behemoth’s toes simply fizzled out on contact. There wasn’t even the slightest mark made against her red toenail polish, least as far as their eyes could tell.

With those looming red-painted toes positioned so precariously close to the courtyard, there was a great temptation to run away. But, they were all either smart enough to realize the futility of that, or paralyzed by fear too much to do anything but tremble in place.

That was all *before* Lachelle lied down. Once she did that, screams rung out and fists clenched. Across the city was pandemonium from such a simple gesture, but for the Lilliputian executives this was the moment where they realized they were noticed. They simply had to be.

Not much thought was given to the calamitous cacophony going on in the city from those gargantuan movements. Sirens blared, screams reached crescendos before being silenced; it was all at the back of those executives’ minds. They were absolutely entranced and awestruck as the Brobdingnagian’s entire face moved towards them.

The massive woman’s visage stretched for thousands of Lilliputian feet. Her smile alone would be over 1100ft. They could get lost in the caves of her nostrils, or be blown away with an errant exhale. But, before their thoughts could wander on all the ways they could casually be obliterated by her, she took their attention in full.

Her mouth opened. Another simple gesture with so much behind it due to her scale. Her humid breath wafted over them like a sauna. They could hear the saliva snapping, the tiny subtle movements of her tongue. They could see all the bands of spittle dangle and snap. Even the tiniest droplets to her made a splashing sound as they slipped to the ‘minute’ pools of saliva which must’ve rested beneath her tongue.

She leaned in just a tad more, and that tongue of hers poked out. It was a pink leviathan: bumpy and unstoppable. A true monster in its own right, it attacked fast. All the executives screamed as they thought this would be it, but they were wrong. The tongue quickly poked at the security staff only, leaving the executives be.

In the span of a second or two the tip of that slick muscle poked down and lapped them all up. The saliva adhered the security squad and they were gone, drawn back into a monstrous cavern of a maw. A mouth that could devour the city over the course of a day or two, dozens if not hundreds of buildings at a time.

The tongue retreated, the lips sealed, and they heard the sickening sound of a casual swallow. They were gone: the entire security force was gone save one lucky fool who stood by the thin puddle of saliva left behind. He was dry, having dodged the tongue, and the air quickly worked to dry much of the 2 meter layer of spittle left on the concrete.

The other security staff were far from lucky. Soon as they were in her mouth they realized just how absolutely doomed their were. Each papillae of Lachelle’s tongue made for a significant ‘terrain’ hazard. The entire tongue was too sticky and slick with the cloying saliva to move.

On that note, two guards perished to the spittle itself. One was due below a droplet as it fell from the palate of the Brobdingnagian’s mouth to inundate and drown him. The other fell off the side of the tongue and splashed down into the pool beneath that muscle. His legs broke and he quickly drowned.

Yet, even those were better fates then being swallowed alive. A tilt of the tongue and they were thrust into darkness. Surrounded in saliva, they went down her throat on a trip that at once seemed like forever yet too fast all the same. Once those disorienting, colossal movements of that long esophagus finished they were thrust through a fleshy valve into the Brobdingnagian’s gut proper.

It was dark and loud. Her heat beat boomed around as unignorable ambiance, yet that paled in comparison to all the gurgling roars in the hot torrid environment. Beneath them was something wet and a tad mushy with a bit of a give beneath the steps of their shoes.

The security staff eventually had the foresight to pull out their connection-less phones for use as flashlights. The light was too feeble to reveal more than their immediate surroundings. Fields of green and bits of purple and white surrounded them. They were like plants, curious expansive leaves underfoot. The smell of the stomach surrounded them, but there was also a faint hint of vinegar as well.

It was salad.

They realized they were on the digesting mass of Brobdingnagian-scale salad the megalithic woman must’ve had for lunch. The purple and white stuff were shavings of radishes. The leaves beneath their feet were lettuce. That hint of vinegar and herbs was some kind of vinaigrette.

It occurred to them that they were food: no, mere seasoning. Spice if even. They were nothing to her. Her stomach would deal with them just as easily as if they were sprinkles of pepper on her greens. They’d digest easier than a shaving of greens.

They didn’t have much longer in there. The stomach churned and their footing was lost. Acid dropped all around them, roared as waves just at the side of their partially-digested salad isles. It wasn’t long till they fell into the sea of juices and began to melt. Any bit of leaf or other vegetable in reach simply turned to slush when they tried to use it as a raft.

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On the outside, Lachelle moved her head back and her fingers gently touched the ‘pendant’ of her necklace.

“Good.”, said Himari. “Now lower me down if you please.”