Chapter #5Continue exploring. by: Relate   For now though, you are compelled to more closely inspect the numerous tiny, flea-sized beings skittering on the ground below. Looking straight down, barely perceptible clouds of dust still settle around all sides of your feet simply as a result of moving to standing up. You cannot help but wonder at the tiny people’s perception of your inexplicably immense size. Even from your distant perspective, your sneakers alone appear truly mountainous in contrast to the soft, slowly sinking landscape on which they are firmly planted. Each long, white, grass-stained monolith spans the length of several square fields, as though they were hulls of vast, otherworldly spaceships. Just one of your running shoes could house an entire neighborhood within.
You smile sort of childishly, amused by the implications of the comical if crude visualization. Any expedition by these tiny people into the interior of one of your titanic sneakers would probably require gasmasks and hazmat suits! You are an extremely well-groomed and clean guy, but even so, the moisture-loving inner walls of thick, spongy fabric that house your feet – not to mention the spongy, faded soles themselves – had unavoidably become hot and humid biomes of microscopic flora and fauna over time, as is typical for an active guy like yourself. To yourself or any other being of your size, at any normal distance away, the atmosphere contained within would be unnoticed and unnoteworthy. To the world below, however, these sneakers have contained the athletically-veined feet of a giant, and magnified in scale, the moist, cavernous, bacteria-laden interior would likely seem biohazardous to the little guys. The thick miasma generated over the day’s course would surely be intensified in both potency and unpleasantness to such tiny beings, despite how little impact it has on you. You toy with the idea of exposing them to your sneakers through some prank and resist devilishly snickering to yourself at the idea.
That being said, you can only imagine how titanic these ordinary objects must appear to the infinitesimal people scurrying in between them, flanked by two countryside-long monstrosities of alien material and design. Looking at one sneaker, long sections of synthetic, ventilating silver mesh, attached to a single endlessly long sole of dirtied, adhesive-laden white rubber, towers over a dusty landscape, with no building even coming close! Hanging down the side of each sneaker are your faded white shoelaces, composed of thick, cable-like threads coiled into one another, which are wider even than houses. You marvel at how even the most insignificant of details must be appreciable to beings of such a scale, down to every grass stain, streak of dirt, frayed thread, and flake of crumbling rubber.
Lifting one foot and tilting it on its side proves even more fascinating. Each treaded sole is a dark, patterned maze of blue, friction-eroded trapezoids and rectangles, intersected by crisscrossing white valleys in a waffle-like pattern. Compacted within these grooves are splintered tree trunks you demolished, layers of trampled wheat-like crops, and broken, metal power lines. These objects lie in stark contrast to the material you tracked from your own world: boulder-sized pebbles, tightly pushing against and deforming the rubber walls, as well as torn blades of grass and other lawn detritus you mowed. You even see a patch of discarded chewing gum, containing a wasp you swatted and a couple of pesky ants you stamped on earlier at a picnic. You make a mental note to later remove them with a penny.
Lowering your foot back down and focusing on further movement, you even see what appears to be a gnat-sized airplane, perhaps one used to fertilize crops, flying slowly along the inner side of your other sneaker. Heavily creased and compressed under your ever-shifting weight, you picture that the immense porous wall of air-injected foam must seem almost otherworldly to its tiny occupant. Even if he were to crash directly into the spongy, heavily cushioned sole, the tiny black mark it would leave behind would be imperceptible amid the various scuffs and grass stains of active use. You know you would never even feel it. Without even moving, you shift your weight slightly, amused at how the pilot immediately diverts as he perceives a deep groaning and grinding from the monolith. Even the imperceptible shifting of your weight is enough to alarm those below.
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