A small story about a friendly fox that sometimes likes to indulge his bad side. A com done for the wonderful ~

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Tails yawned as he thumped down into his desk chair, his eyes half drooped over and his shoulders slumped. It had been another long day of trying to keep the world safe, one that had left him feeling tired and unmotivated. He glanced around his lab and saw the various machines that lay on his desks in different states of completeness. Some of them needed a tuneup, some of them weren’t working at all. So much work to be done, but he just wasn’t feeling it.

He glanced down at his feet and saw his large shoes dangling in the air, and the tile floor just a few inches below. It was covered in dirt and other specs of things. He’d need to clean up one day, but that just wasn’t something he needed to do right now.

But, looking at all those tiny specks of dirt gave him an idea. The fox boy leaned back in his chair as a small smirk flashed across his lips. A while ago he had perfected a little experiment of his, one that he hadn’t told anyone about. One that he liked to keep all to himself.

The boy licked his lips, then turned to the computer next to him and powered it on. Tails was known for being such a friendly fox most of the time. Good-natured, quick to help out whoever he could and sweeter than any other animal around. But, he had another side to him. A side that didn’t come out much, but every once in a while, he liked to indulge. After all, foxes are predators.

He opened the program and went through some of the settings, first picking a city, then tuning the tracking controls. Finally, a dialog popped up asking for a scale. “Hm…” The fox hummed as he looked at the box. “Let’s go for… 1/7000 this time. Should make ‘em nice and tiny.”

His gloved finger pressed the enter button and the machine began. Another machine to his left began to glow, then it fired a beam at the floor not too far away from him. The light filled the room as a form slowly materialized in front of him. Soon, it took shape completely.

When the machine finally powered off, a miniature city lay in the open part of the floor. It was a perfect model, complete with details that were so small they would be impossible to see. There were cars in the street and buildings of every type. There were parks and trees, advertisements and rivers, and millions of tiny inhabitants that were all extremely confused.

Tails’ smirk grew as he pushed himself off of his chair, his sneakers impacting the ground and sending a miniature earthquake through the city in front of him. Then, simply, he walked forward, his huge feet thumping the ground until he came to the outskirts. There, he lifted up his sneaker and moved it over some of the small buildings that lay on the city's edge, then simply brought it down without even looking. After all, this was just another step.

The fox felt the crunch of buildings and concrete crumbling under his sneaker treads. Though he couldn’t hear the screams he knew that there were hundreds of tiny sized inhabitants being crushed to death, screaming for their lives as he simply stood on them.

After all, that’s what his machine was designed to do. It scanned one of the nearby cities, took in a huge amount of data, and then produced an exact copy, down to the individual inhabitant, right here in his room. The buildings were the same, the streets were the same, the people were the same. Only difference was that they were 1/7000th of their normal size. Now, even a fully grown alligator would only be a quarter of a millimeter tall.

The fox shook his head as he took another step forward, towards the heart of the city, his huge sneakers leaving a path of dirty wreckage in his footprints. Each step was a new earthquake, a new disaster for the tiny city as entire blocks were wiped out by a single footfall, reduced to dust and flattened between his hard treads and the tile of his lab. Some of them would manage to survive by being crammed into the tiny spaces that cut across the hard rubber of his sole, but that thought only made the fox smirk more.

“This is pathetic,” He said as he came to the center of the city and stood among the skyscrapers. These huge buildings that towered over every single inhabitant were barely even five centimeters tall now. His sneaker was bigger than that.

Tails then crouched down, his body lowering closer to the city, his twin tails moving gently behind him as his still half drooped over eyes scanned the blocks. It was impossible for him to make out anything more than the general streets that made up the city. Anything smaller was pretty much microscopic. “Your entire city, and I can barely even see the streets. Bet you thought you were safe, huh?”

His voice was monotone and he said it, like it was simply a fact. He was passive, almost uninterested, as he continued. “At this size, you’re more like bugs than people.” He lowered his hand further, then extended his pointer finger. With remarkable cruelty, he dragged his finger across the landscape, crushing streets and cars, knocking aside the tallest building, and killing thousands before simply picking it up and observing the damage.

He looked at his fingertip and saw all the dirt and crushed concrete that littered his glove. “No. More like bacteria than bugs. At least I can see a bug.”

He shook his head again, then reached down. His fingers dug into one of the streets and burrowed under it, then pulled it upwards so that he held a chunk in his hand. He moved it towards his arm, right above the lip of his glove, and slowly poured the mixture of buildings and lives into it.

The fox couldn’t help to chuckle as he felt the hundreds of tiny, almost microscopic grains move down his glove, past his palm, over his fingers. Some of them were caught and grabbed by the minuscule amount of sweat that had formed on his skin, others tumbled all the way into the darkest parts of his glove and pooled near his fingertips.

For a moment he imagined what it would be like for those who had survived the ordeal. Stuck on his skin, too small to even be seen. The heat would be unimaginable, the smell of his slightly evaporated sweat making the air thick and hard to breathe. The blackness complete and all-encompassing. They’d have no hope left.

It gave him another idea. The fox stood up, back to his full height, towering over the micro-sized city like a titan come to end the world. But he wasn’t trying to bring the apocalypse. He was just having fun.

The fox shifted his weight, then slipped one of his massive paws out of his sneaker. He placed down on the city next to his shoe, momentarily lost himself with the pleasure of feeling each and every crunch against the dirty bottom of his sock, then did the same with his other foot.

“I bet this is horrible for you,” he said down to the microbes. “Me, just standing here. Not even moving. My socks probably stink after being cooped up in my shoes all this time. That smell, polluting your air, making it hard to breathe. Must suck.”

He flexed his toes and felt more cracking and crunching under them. He knew that those trapped under his paw must be going through hell. The pressure alone forcing them flat, the smell polluting their oxygen, the heat burning them, each droplet of sweat big enough to roll over a city block and drown them.

“I’m sure some of you want a closer look though. What do you say? Why don’t we try it?” He crouched down again, his heel lifting off of the ground just enough to allow the crushed inhabitants under them a moment to see light once again. Tails scooped up another small section of the city, a few blocks wide, then moved it over to his sock. With his free hand, he pulled the fabric open, then he dumped the microscopic inhabitants inside their fabric prison.

Just like with his glove, he felt the particles moving over his skin. The lucky ones were caught on the top part of his foot, still trapped within his sock but in a much better place than the others. Those not so lucky continued down, hitting the sides of his sock before slipping across his sole. Some drifted down to his toes and found a place in the tiny piles of gunk that had accumulated there, destined to become just another speck of toe jam. Some moved under his heel, trapped in his sweat.

Then the fox stood back up, his heel falling onto the city again, crushing those who were unfortunate enough to survive the initial stomp. Again he flexed his toes, but this time he was greeted with a new feeling, that of tiny specks moving around between the massive walls of flesh. Chunks of buildings that hadn’t been completely crumbled rolled over his skin, sank deeper between his toes and moved under his sole. How many thousands were in his sock right now? How many hundreds were dying with each movement, either suffocated by the toxic smell, drowned in the sweat and grime, or finally crushed by the unholy amount of weight that fell on them?

Tails smiled as he thought about it. He lifted his foot again and took a small step to his right, his sock coming down on a new patch of the city that had so far gone un-crushed. The mega tall skyscrapers offered no resistance to the pure amount of force he exuded simply by existing.

He loved this feeling. Being so much bigger than all these millions of people. Standing over them, standing on them, knowing that there were hundreds looking up at him from below unable to come to terms with the fact that he was the same cute little fox who had helped them out so many times before, but could now crush them with his tiniest toe. His tails swished around happily behind him and he pictured them. The little microbes running for their lives, those pinned under his huge feet, those still trapped inside his sock and his glove, the pressure and heat only growing by the second.

They were nothing to him. Not even insects. Barely even alive.

He then turned towards his desk and found what he was looking for. Sitting on it was a single lens he had been developing for this exact purpose. Without worrying about those beneath him, the giant fox boy walked across his lab, each step leaving a deep scar in the city and crushing thousands, until he reached it.

“Here we go,” he said as he took the contact lens and placed it on his eye. “If I want to see you, I need a special device for it. This’ll magnify your tiny bodies by about ten times. At least then I’ll be able to see you.” The lens turned on and began adjusting automatically.

The giant fox turned back to the city and crouched down, peering closer. Now he could make out all the little details. The lines in the street, the broken cars and the crumbled houses. The tiny dark forms that either ran from him in a panic or starred up at him like they were looking at a god.

He simply moved his pointer finger over them, then lowered it. With a single poke, all that was left of that part of the city was a crater. When he pulled his finger back up he noticed that the tip was covered in dirt. The remains of what he had just crushed.

“Maybe I’ll be able to see one of you now,” he said as he brought his finger closer, right up to his face, and tried to make out any living forms amongst the wreckage. After a few seconds, he found one. A green rabbit looked up at him with terror across his face. “There you are,” Tails said. “A little bunny, unfortunate enough for me to find. This must be terrible for you. So tiny, so powerless to do anything to stop me. But at least you’re not below my feet, like so many of your neighbors. Maybe, if you beg, I’ll be nice.”

The giant fox couldn’t help but smirk as the rabbit threw himself onto his glove and bowed to him, then kissed the dirty fabric of his glove. “You don’t have any self-respect, do you? Guess you shouldn’t. You’re not really a person anymore, are ya? Just a teeny tiny little microbe on my fingertip. And I’m probably going to crush you anyway.” He chuckled as the rabbit looked back up at him, terrified. “What? I said that if you begged I might be nice.” He simply brought his forefinger and thumb together, then rubbed.

He felt more crunches, more streets being smashed and pulverized, more buildings reduced to pebbles. And maybe, if he really, really concentrated, he could feel a tiny rabbit’s body breaking apart.

With that finished, the fox boy stood up and looked back at the town. The huge buildings toppled over, the streets cracked, the landscape dotted with the craters that formed from his footfalls. This had been good for him. A fun way to blow off steam and remind himself of how amazing he really could be. Outside of these walls he was a small, playful, happy-go-lucky freedom fighter. But here, for this city of microbes, he was a god.

“Now to clean up,” he said, like the words meant nothing. He walked over to his shoes again and picked them up, then walked back towards his computer, leaving a final trail of crushed buildings and lives in his wake. Then he simply hit a few buttons and started up the program again.

“Hm… how to dispose of you…” he mumbled to himself. “I could just disintegrate you, but then I’d need to sweep up. No… I think I’ve got a better idea.” With a small grin, the fox put in new settings. Scale: 1/1,000,000. He put in a new location, then hit the enter button.

His machine glowed again, then flashed a beam of light. When the fox looked back to the city he found nothing but a bare spot on his floor, completely clean. Now, the only remnants of the city were the crumbled remains in his sock and glove, and those that were wedged into his sneaker treads.

“Alright, fun times over,” the fox said as he stretched. “Now I gotta do some work.”



But the city had not simply been erased from existence. Instead, the hundreds of thousands of terrified inhabitants were greeted with a new world around them. One that seemed completely alien and impossible to withstand. Above them, the clear sky was replaced with a thick sealing of off-white, made up of billions of strands of something hard and brutal. Below them was a floor made of a moving red substance that gave off an immeasurable amount of heat, with an atmosphere that smelled of vile grime and death. The heat was stifling, the air unbreathable, the moisture in the atmosphere clinging to the buildings and dragging on them.

There were piles of gunk that towered higher than the tallest building, and creatures on the horizon that looked like alien monsters, each standing thousands of feet tall. There were orbs of liquid that moved through the streets, bigger than city blocks and full of tiny substances that made the water look almost black.

What none of the inhabitants realized was that their entire city had been shrunken and teleported again. But this time, instead of being placed on the floor of a cute fox, then had been reduced to the absolute limits of tiny size and placed under the toenail of an echidna that simply sat on the steps of an old and ancient temple.

Most of the inhabitants would perish beneath knuckles’ toenail after only a few minutes. Some, however, would cling to life for many years to come, building a new home for themselves in those hellish conditions. They braced themselves with every footfall, screamed as they were shoved into the black oven that was his shoe, sucked the sweat off of his skin. These were the people who came to accept their new role in life, that accepted that they were no more than microbes, living on the toe of a dirty, sweaty, god.