The view was unbearable for Wiktor's mind. He felt a great need to get away; to hide. He turned his back to the landscape-like feet and legs of the young woman and proceeded to walk away towards the transparent barrier, the boundary of his world, taking thoughtlessly careful steps on top of the labyrinthian ground. Too distressed to be mentally present alongside his body, he got caught in the loop of thinking about the very act of thinking - until he reached the vast, plastic window. He put his forearms on its surface and leaned against it; it smelled of static.
Wiktor looked outside. He had no fear of heights, yet it made him feel dizzy, as if he was standing by the window of a high-rise on an exceptionally clear day. He saw it vividly now; a great open field of cheap, synthetic wood extended for what looked like kilometers, only to abruptly end upon meeting the vertical mountain that was the wall; an immense, featureless slab of dirty beige. Raising his head towards the sky, he could see it open up and give way to a setback, a gorge that let the sunlight flood in through great panes of glass. He was in a land of extraordinary spaciousness indeed but one nevertheless finite in size; packed rows of metal-plated skyscrapers on each side enclosed him tightly, and so did the solid vault of artificial heaven high above. There was more to see behind him, but he dared not look. Having some of his view obstructed by a massive silver wall immediately to his right, seemingly the source of all the hum and of the vibrations reaching him through the floor and the transparent plastic, and fearing what he might see on his left, Wiktor simply kept looking forward - knowing very well where he was and what had happened to him, but refusing to accept it.
As reality began to sink in, the boy’s legs gave way beneath him. He sat down, feeling the weight of his initial shock, and slid his fingers into his hair before letting his heavy head rest between his hands. He managed to stay afloat; he wasn’t sinking anymore. It was about time he tried to pull himself together and started looking for a way out.
Having regained to some extent his composure, and with the panicky, distracting thoughts inside his head quieting down, Wiktor noticed that so far he was the only one around to have broken the pervasive silence. But why? He understood what had happened to him, or at least that he ended up inside the chamber of the very nail polish device that he had just been fighting over; so shouldn't there be some commotion? Shouldn't he be hearing the girls talk, seeing them move about, if not in alarm, then perhaps just to get a better view of him out of sheer curiosity? And where did those giant bare legs come from? Haunted by all these unanswered questions, Wiktor turned around again.
Same as before. Nothing had changed while he wasn’t looking. A sea of black stepping stones with a monumental foot raising above them; and behind it - another. It staggered his mind how small he was; he could barely fit the freighter-sized and -shaped mass of brute human bodiness - sculpted into the flexible form of the lower limb's sedulous foundation and covered in a curving expanse of pink-beige skin - within his field of view. It seemed too vast to only be a part of some greater whole, yet it rose high upwards, piercing the transparent enclosure and topping off with a startlingly personal visage, in which he recognized the face of Martyna. It seemed like she was looking right at him.
Wiktor felt offended. "Martyna?" he asked himself silently. "Now what's her problem, why is she butting into this? Where's Julia?" It was just the two of them. He tried waving with both arms to get the girl's attention, but she wasn't moving one bit, her face stuck in an empty grimace; her hair dangling motionlessly by the sides of her head.
"Hey!" he shouted, scaring himself slightly with the sound of his own voice filling the silent air. "Get me out of here! Can you hear me? Hey!" She did not respond. "Ah, you dumb twat," he remarked, though not as loud as before in case she could hear him after all; him being upset didn't change the fact that he wasn't in a favorable position to argue with her. With his voice and gestures having proven inadequate for the task, he figured he would have a better chance of grabbing Martyna's attention if he tried touching her instead. However, he underestimated just how much ground he had to cover to get to her - ground that was quite tricky to traverse, too.
As Wiktor hopped from one plastic block and ridge to another, his destination kept growing in relative size until Martyna's little toe began to appear to the boy as big as a suburban house. Approaching its immediate vicinity, he started having second thoughts and doubts about his capabilities and was feeling more and more uneasy. He got worried that he could be easily swept away or crushed if she moved her foot even a tiny bit. Her body gave him the impression of a massive, mecha-like structure, controlled - admittedly - by the girl, but only from some far away location, making it to some degree independent and personified; It was understandably difficult for him not to give all the distinctive parts of her biological soma their own agency if the source of Martyna’s personhood - her face - remained well outside the reach of his eyes whenever his sight was focused on anything below her neck.
The boy anxiously stretched out his arm and touched the angled side of Martyna's toe, finding a spot between two furrows on her skin. It wasn't particularly warm, but it wasn't cold, either; its soft and smooth texture caressed his hand, giving the colossal toe a delicate quality that subverted his initial expectations. Still, standing right by it made him feel like a nuisance; worse - like an invisible beggar, or maybe like a kid that couldn’t get anyone to pay attention to him. He pushed her toe with both arms, slightly bending the pillow-like, elastic skin in the process. No reaction on her part. Wiktor raised his head; Martyna was still looking down right at him, as if he was a lone ant visiting her on a beach rather than a fellow person that she could communicate with. Irritated by the lack of progress, he began punching and kicking her toe, but the only thing he succeeded in was getting himself winded.
He couldn’t stand the girl’s unresponsiveness. Being given nothing to go on made him confused and indecisive again. He desperately wished she would reply, make fun of him if that’s what it took; did anything but just stare. In fact, he didn’t even notice her blink once. Was she waiting for him to do something specific? Would he have to beg her to get him out? He realized she could be taking advantage of this entire situation just to humiliate him for all the times he asked her not to be such a brat. If that was the case, then he was inclined to agree that it was working. The boy was getting frantic, with anxiety filling his chest as he began to feel forgotten by the world that refused to reply.
"Look, I'm sorry!" he shouted, cracking his voice. "I won't bother you again, I promise! Can you hear me? I'm sorry!" He paused for a few seconds to study her face. "Do you want me to kiss your feet? Is that what it's all about, Martyna? Hey!" All the yelling was straining his throat and making him light-headed, but the only thing he cared about now was getting the girl to react to him. "Is that what you want me to do? Martyna, my queen, is that it? Tell me, I'm right here, right at your feet!"
Martyna remained silent and so did not decline the boy's offer. Fed up with half-measures, he dashed towards her toe and with great force buried his face in her skin. He started kissing it as intensely as he could and kept going, painfully flattening his own nose and putting considerable pressure on his neck and chest, until he could no longer postpone taking a breath. Pulling his head away, he went on to try to quickly fix his now very messy hair and found that it had become annoyingly sticky; soon he realized it wasn’t just the hair - his entire face had gained a somewhat waxy and viscous coating, as if he had just been toiling under the summer sun for an extended period of time. As Wiktor licked his lips, the taste of salt and earthly chalk settled onto his palate and became seemingly suspended in the air he breathed in and out. He was fully aware it was the taste of Martyna’s skin - the skin on her foot, to be exact - which made even weirder the fact that it didn’t seem to him particularly offensive to the senses; and so, instead of spitting or wiping his mouth, he expunged the thoughts about this odd experience from his mind and once again turned upwards towards the girl’s face.
There was something he was missing - that he was sure about. Maybe he was too small to be seen, to be felt? Maybe the device got him fooled and in reality he was looking at some freeze-frame or some snapshot while life outside went as usual? Then: an epiphany; his phone was still in his pocket-- alas, it was dead. Wasn’t that exactly why he entered the cursed locker room in the first place? With that, he was out of options. There was nothing left to do but wait and hope that things somehow change for the better on their own.
Wiktor crouched down in resignation - and dropped his bottom limply onto the rubbery floor. It was all proving to be so tiresome; he needed a break from this frenzy. As he then proceeded to lay down in the least awkward position he could come up with, it occurred to him that he could try simply sleeping his troubles out. Perhaps something would eventually happen.
It only takes a short while for a person lying motionless in a rather sparsely populated room to start feeling uncomfortably chilly, and although Wiktor did bring a hoodie to school that day, he left it in the classroom - he did not expect his search for Julia to end in such a way. He had already embarrassed himself in multiple ways, so what difference would it make to keep doing it for a little longer? Instead of dwelling on the inappropriateness of his conduct, Wiktor found some warmth and refuge under Martyna’s toes.
Snuggling up to the wrinkled skin in a stuffy crevice somewhere beneath her little toe, the ever-tired boy was certain he would have no trouble falling asleep. Yet he did not; neither that time, nor later, nor on any other occasion during his long stay inside the device.