All tied up
#1 of Twenty-minute tales
Written in exactly twenty minutes. Yay me!
A quick little idea I had, and a scenario that I really wish I got to see more often: A micro suddenly and inexplicably finds himself tied to the strap that goes between the toes of a giant's footwear.
You knew that going too far off the beaten path in this unfamiliar part of the woods could be a bad idea, but you hadn't expected things to go so horribly wrong so quickly. First you were knocked out by something unseen, then you woke up to find yourself tied up against ... something. A rope had been tied firmly around your left wrist, wrapped around this thing behind you, and then tied to your right wrist to keep you in place. Your ankles had received similar treatment, leaving your legs slightly spread eagle. It was too dark to see anything yet, but you felt like you were tied with your back against a tree.
Well, not exactly a tree. You couldn't see what it was, but it definitely didn't feel like bark against your exposed back. You were too bewildered by your situation to care about the night air against your bare hide; you just knew you wanted to be somewhere other than here. It didn't help that there was a lingering smell in the area, something that you couldn't quite place but that seemed to build up the more you breathed of it. It briefly reminded you of taking off your shoes after a long day, but it the thought seemed to strange to be real.
As night slowly gave way to morning, you could start to see more of your surroundings. The terrain in front of you seemed strange. Unnatural. It was a dark shade of gray, with a strangely regular pattern of valleys carved through it. Aside from that pattern, you noticed the ground dipped steeply in an area closest to you, almost like a well-weathered crater, while a hill rose up and obscured your further view. You tried to turn your head side to side, but with your arms stretched to your side, moving your neck was a challenge. A loud creaking noise made you jump, or at least as close to jumping as you could manage in this situation. You heard a couple loud thumps as if distant thunder were rumbling across the land. Then the noise came again, louder. And then, as if from a terrible B-movie, you saw what you could only describe as a monster.
Looming far, far above you was some sort of ... thing. You couldn't tell what it was, as even straining your neck you couldn't see past this thing's knees. Its skin was a deep, emerald green, and seemed to glisten with some sort of natural wetness. Perhaps it had just left the shower? Whatever it was, it walked on two legs, and its feet were right in front of you. Your gaze drifted down as your neck gave out, leaving you to stare at the toes before you. The being's stance was digitigrade, with its weight resting heavily on three toes. The foot seemed rather broad for its size, rising well into the air, with two hind toes instead of a heel.
It took another step forward, then crouched down toward you. Did it see you? You tried to press yourself against the object at your back, hoping not to be noticed. Perhaps you were too small to be seen. You almost hoped you were. You wondered if it would be worse to be seen or not. Your thoughts were quickly cut off as the world seemed to move.
Sovrim slid out of bed and looked down at his sandals. They were a fully-custom job, meant to accommodate his chameleon-like feet. Their thin soles were just the sort of thing to keep his sensitive soles protected from the searing heat of the pavement on a summer's day without depriving him of natural sensitivity. He smiled and reached down, preparing to put on his footwear before another long day.
You kept struggling against your bounds as you started to notice more details about what you'd been tied to. This giant's fingers were wrapped around a strap that arched well above your head. The material was tethered to the object to which you were bound. As the ground moved, you noticed other straps well in the distance, past what was once your horizon. Then, this beast's foot came barreling toward you with dizzying speed. You screamed. You prayed. You cursed. You went completely unheard. The two largest toes quickly slid around you and past you until your face was nearly smothered into the flesh between those house-sized digits.
Slowly, you pieced together the puzzle. The scent. The rubbery material at your back. You, somehow, had been tied to the strap of this titan's footwear. As the giant began to walk, the movements were dizzying. Each step sent you swinging backward before you crashed into the ground again. His toes moved forward and back with each step, slamming into your torso every now and again, while you were lost between those enormous digits. When he went outside, the light brightened considerably, and then the heat began to rise. Whether it was sweat or something else, the toes began to coat you in a strongly-scented musk that could never be confused for the scent of something other than feet.
And despite your struggling and suffering, Sovrim simply went about his business today, unaware of the ant-sized passenger between his toes.