The Great Awakening (Chapter 27) (Patreon)

Baker lay in place on the tank’s floor with his arms across his chest, despondent. Some of the footage delivered to commanders on the ground revealed that the girl had earlier “plucked” a number of buildings like flower stems, some of the structures even mostly-surviving in her conscientious grip for a few seconds before crumbling to nothing against the overbearing pressure of her extremities. But there was a humongous difference between a skyscraper and the small, ultimately meaningless obstacles of tanks next to a being of such unimaginable scale. And if she lacked the capacity even to pick up the metropolis’s sturdiest high-rises without accidentally shattering them, then the same willful effort imposed on ground vehicles, well…

            The tanks returned to the formless metal ore clumps they’d once constituted, only now with their inch-thin armored compartments stuffed with the remains of the bold troopers who believed for a brief shining second that they could defeat the hand of a woman whose fingers could rival Godzilla for collateral damage. Crushed metal refuse joined the sprinkled array of dust and humanity etched into the plush ravines of Lilly’s thick fingerpads, and when she at last lifted her middle digit again from this especially focused press-down, the street around her briefly lifted like fly paper tacked to her skin before releasing and collapsing back into itself, freshly pockmarked with carved rock impressions five hundred feet across. Half the smashed tanks became indistinguishable from this especially deep new sinkhole, while the rest clung like sticky recently-squished fleas to her finger during her ascension, up from a position close enough to sever rooftops with her eyelashes and whisper holes into the ground like an air-cannon, all the way back to a crouched pose that nevertheless soared five miles into the sky.

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            Lilly rested gymnastically on the balls of her high-arched feet while continuing to squat close enough to seek her next target, wherever or whomever they might be. Though this posture was tough to maintain without rocking forward, the girl wished not to damage more of the precious nano-manmade ground than was necessary while not intently watching it with both eyes wide open, for that would defeat the purpose otherwise. She wanted, needed, to see all of her handiwork (and footwork) in action.

            Earlier on in this whole amusing ritual of pilgrimages between living model-towns, she’d found herself concerned and blushing at the thought of holding herself up this way, knowing just how many eyes would have a view up her flared skirt, especially while hunched upon her upended bare heels. That embarrassment had since left her, not only because this activity had started to feel like an exercise of peaceful solitude, only reminding Lilly of the human life that was technically involved when she leaned down near enough to see vehicles and clusters of soldiers large enough to catch the eye.

            It also seemed increasingly ridiculous in the girl’s mind to derive any humiliation from peeping toms getting a long peek at silken panties the size of clouds, not just because it was probably to be the last image they would clearly see before succumbing to the falling mile-plus-long terraforming shape of her naked sole anyway, but also because the distance between Lilly and the people she once stood alongside as equals seemed faintly comical, like comparing the worries of a majestic jungle cat with the ants that occupied the dirt between  her paws, and even that comparison was being overly generous, considering the humans down there were so much smaller than insects now compared to their accidental overseer. Their feelings, and thus their possible perversions, at seeing her dainty underwear-clad buttocks, supple and shapely as tight-sculpted globes themselves, were inconsequential as their physical size and weight, which was small enough that Lilly couldn’t have even registered their bodies as holding mass without literally flooding her palm with a small lake’s worth of piled-up micro-humans. So why should their opinions carry any more significance than their weightless bodies?

            It wasn’t a judgment on her part: just math that was impossible to ignore.

            Finger-Godzilla had abandoned her rampage, but there were still so many bastions of yet-unbroken city that deserved attention, patches of resilient buildings and even whole neighborhoods defiantly standing like miraculous and beautiful individual flowers in a wind-swept field after a tornado ripped through. These scraps of surviving architecture were especially fascinating to the dark-haired mega-angel, and demanded closer inspection to see if there was anything special that made them able to withstand every earth-splitting step, every unsettling scrape of a finger through the land, and every delighted outbound breath from her amiably smiling lips turning everything into a windy cascade of flying debris.

            What’s more, Lilly was determined to visit every single such instance of undamaged property that she could spot, and while she knew that this cute but pitiful mattress-sized island was a little too miniscule in its highly-populated details to fell each building before she departed, it would be a waste not to seek out all opportunities for discovery that she could. Because that was what she was here for, above all else (literally). That, and the fact that this really was the most fun she’d had since she was a child, if not ever.

            This was about when the bridges truly captured Lilly’s focus. Most of them were thin enough to almost seem like gossamer spider webs linked to the city from afar, but once the girl steadily tiptoed her way back over the meager width of Manhattan for a better look at the seafaring structures leading back to the mainland, their delicacy made her take pause. A handful of them were already swamped, half-sunken into the bay, whether because of the waves churned up while Lilly shuffled toward land, or side-effects of her toes scrunching too near to the precipice and cutting the stone and steel which tethered the bridge to the island. Still, an impressive many of them remained intact, which pleased the girl, and again she approached as carefully as possible, one hand gently braced against the shallow pool of the bay and the other splayed in a previous footstep canyon while lowering herself down for better study.

            The bridges might’ve seemed distant from the eye level of whatever infinitesimal beings still wandered luckily amidst the wreckage below, but to Lilly, they appeared almost like adjacent strings of a guitar, laced in low arches along the tiny suspension towers which stood nobly erect in the foaming waters. The river still gushed with a dangerously high tide after the games played during her arrival. Once again bowed low enough to spy more individual detail in the geography, Lilly became aware of the multicolored streams of glimmering metal plugging up the bridges like rainbow bubbles in the straw of a smoothie, only she knew them to be cars.

            When they were squished together in a literal life-or-death traffic jam like this, she could actually distinguish them to some degree, and after the girl happily realized the evacuation efforts were only partly successful, meaning a great many new “friends” were still in her grasp and ripe for hand-greeting, she was even more enchanted by the sight of the bridges strung across the water. And Lilly couldn’t help but reach out to feel one for herself, causing the web-like cables to snap from the first moment her pinky tip swooped through in a gentle attempt to caress the line from one suspension tower to another.