"--an I thought," Wiktor was still finishing his sentence when he found himself thrown suddenly into an unfamiliar, outright alien environment. Startled by the change, he gasped, nigh inaudibly, and held his breath for a moment as he succumbed to the involuntary behavior of freezing in shock. “...what the fuck?” he muttered, unable to tell what the vast area that stretched before him was and why he was looking at it through an enormous window of some kind. Except for a low humming noise reminiscent of a server room or a laboratory, it was eerily quiet.

Wiktor looked to the sides, then down; he noticed that the black floor he was standing on was full of holes that had to be maneuvered around. They weren’t deep and wide enough to be a deadly threat, but it could hurt to get accidentally caught in one. He carefully turned around.

He felt light-headed and weak at the knees and in the groin as an unfathomably massive foot of a human he would soon understand to be Martyna appeared in his field of view, towering over the otherwise barren landscape like an ancient, desert monument of an omnipotent deity.

“Now that was quick,” Martyna thought when she heard the device let out a short signal again. She didn’t feel much during the process, apart from a bit of tingling and tickling, similar to the sensation one gets when their legs fall asleep, but certainly not as irksome. “Did it work?” She leaned down towards the chamber, but nothing appeared particularly different. Martyna took her feet out and touched one of them with her hand to make sure that everything important remained as it had been half a minute ago.

Her foot was smooth as silk. There were no blemishes to be spotted, nor could she find any rough or dry skin, and her toenails appeared perfectly pedicured. Everything up to - and including - her ankles felt clean and pristine, as if she had just come out of the shower. For Martyna, who had never really cared much for the appearance of her feet, embracing a tall tomboy's lifestyle that didn’t exactly make her a prime player in the dating game, it all seemed very unusual - but not in a bad way. Despite being a rather small change, it immediately spoke to her feminine side and made her feel a little bit more beautiful. It also almost made her forget the reason why she had decided to meddle with the device - while everyone else was busy - in the first place.

As Martyna then began to wonder whether Wiktor’s presence inside the chamber had anything to do with what she had just experienced, she recalled that - according to the people on the forum she visited - the dozen or so seconds which elapsed while the device was actively performing its duty must have felt to him like almost two weeks. The peculiarity of the entire situation somewhat overwhelmed her. She had no time, however, to think it through - the sounds of footsteps and rising commotion coming from behind the lockers prompted her to hurry up. She had just managed to put her socks and shoes back on and place the machine on the bench when Julia appeared, still on the phone.

"Advanced settings - and then? Force remove module, got it," she repeated her mother’s instructions to her while approaching the device.

Martyna's gamble paid off - she made Wiktor spend eleven days by her feet without anyone noticing and trying to stop her. She knew that it was probably not going to be a secret for long since he was about to be set free, but she decided not to say anything yet, on the off chance that he got successfully scared into submission and wouldn't want to risk making her upset again. She would tell the girls after this whole drama died down. Comedy equals tragedy plus time, after all, especially if you have more than just your own misfortune to laugh at. Schadenfreude could help Julia stay in good spirits and cope better with whatever punishment her mother thought up; she would know that Martyna avenged her and got back at her annoying brother, the guy who caused all this to go awry.

"Huh?" Julia grunted in confusion. "Why does it say 'battery low'?"