“I mean, I’ve gooootta admit that I wasn’t sure about your gift at first Mar-Mar. Not too much of a gamer after all. But damn, ripping demons apart in DREAD has probably healed me way more than dealing with these kids ever could.”

 

Marcy giggled as she fumbled with her dorm key. Behind her a girl in workout clothes jogged through the hall, and Marcy stopped slightly, sneaking a peek as she pumped her arms in tune with whatever music was blaring through her earbuds. The jogger noticed, and smiled wordlessly yet sincerely at Marcy, who smiled back. Marcy watched the student continue, until a voice blared from her own phone that she’d forgotten was between her cheek and her shoulder.

 

“Marcy? Maaaarcy? C’mon, did you get distracted again?”

 

“Oh!!” Marcy snapped back to reality just as the key she’d been fiddling with slipped from her fingers. With a G-rated swear under her breath, she squatted and grabbed the key, before finally unlocking her door and slipping into her apartment. She sighed and dumped a bag of groceries on the tiny kitchen table as she said, “Sorry, Sash. Just got a bit, ahhhhmmm… sidetracked!”

 

Marcy made her way to her bedroom, a tiny thing with a bunkbed. Her roommate tended to spend the weekends at her parents’ house, which left Marcy all the time and freedom in the world to kick back and relax on her own. Without even waiting to take off her shoes, Marcy dumped herself in her gaming chair and booted her PC, loading up Chaos to see if her friends had messaged her while she’d been on the phone. “But honestly Sasha, if you need more boomer shooters I would be more than glad to recommend some to ya. That’s what friends are for after all!”

 

Marcy grabbed a peppermint and tossed it in her mouth, cycling through various windows with lightning speed. Browser, email, social media, webcomic WIP, Mist game updates, she only scanned each of them for just a second before moving onto the next screen. This tended to repeat until her guilt/shame at procrastination forced her to spend more than five minutes straight on any given thing.

 

“Nah. Killing demons is fun and all, but eventually you wanna take on the real thing, know what I’m saying?”

 

This gave Marcy pause. “L-like, real demons? I don’t recall us ever facing off against demons in Amphibia… did you all have any demonic adventures without me?!”

 

“Ugh, not demons. I meant real people. Like, actual people and not just computers?”

 

“Ohhhhhh!” Marcy almost slapped herself. “Yeah, that does make more sense, heh, heh…”

 

“Riiiiight… well, what I’m saying is maybe we could play something together! Even get Anne in on it. Something like Halfnite or whatever the kids are playing. That’d be cool, wouldn’t it? Just like the old days?”

 

“Just… just like the old days…” Marcy seemed to shift into a state halfway between dreaming and awake. She wobbled in her chair, but before her phone slipped out from her shoulder and cheek, she at least had the decency to say, “Oh, I’m really sorry, Sash, but I’ve, ahhh, gotta work on this art project. Forgot how much work I had to do, and the professor is gonna get pissed if I’m late again. Say hi to Anne for me next time you see her!”

 

“Oh, um, sure. Talk to you later! And I’ll do just tha—”

 

Click!

 

Marcy took a deep breath, and she finally let her thoughts wander. And when they did, they wandered to the one thing she’d been fantasizing about all day.

 

Marcy methodically closed out every program on her computer, revealing a cluttered desktop with a wallpaper that showed her, Anne, and Sasha at the trio’s high school graduation. Her PC tower slowed to a hum. One icon was marked by a hastily drawn icon of three multi-colored gems. Without a reference, Marcy was sure she’d made some mistakes in their exact shape, but their blue, green, magenta were hues she would never forget.

 

Marcy clicked it, and the window suddenly opened into a black command prompt. Seven rows displayed immediately, each one containing a singular trio of apparently arbitrary five-digit. Below them was a text-based command:

 

Type in Universe Coordinates.

 

It’s always fun seeing them recoil in hopeless despair when she makes a return trip, Marcy thought. But it was a new day. Now felt like a perfect time to give a new universe a taste of what she had to offer.

 

Marcy pressed ENTER, and collections of numbers flowed across the screen. Randomly chosen, most of them returned ERROR, whether the coordinates didn’t match up with any known reality, or the reality in question was too far away to be accessed with the electric power she had at her disposal. Until suddenly…

 

Match.

 

It didn’t take long after that. Marcy’s PC tower heated up, and its fan whirred and blazed at speeds that it never dared to reach even after day-long sessions of Steampunk 1877. That is because the PC was no longer supplying a signal to the monitor alone; now its processing power was being almost entirely devoted to writing the immense lines of code necessary to determine the spectral wavelengths of the jerry-rigged laser setup that Marcy had installed beneath her desk. There, three multicolor strobe lights shone, and Marcy always adored losing herself in the lightshow.

 

Marcy had long since theorized it since they left Amphibia. An immense power surge was necessary to punch a hole in the universal fabric big enough for a human (or an anthropomorphic frog) to traipse through. But those newts were crafty, and Marcy was sure that the box did more than harness the power; rather, it could also figure out ways to increase its efficiency so that it wouldn’t lose energy simply from one explosive discharge. If Marcy could deduce the algorithm for it, she was certain that by simulating the stones’ superficial characteristics she could do great things by simply supplying a sufficient power source.

 

Well… a month ago, Marcy was able to find that algorithm. It wasn’t easy, and she had to scour through her journal notes for the briefest scraps of hints. But she wasn’t the valedictorian at St. James High for nothing.

 

As Marcy waited for her algorithm to find a suitable world candidate, the lights flickered and dimmed. “Ugh, not again…!” Marcy leapt from her chair and stared out the window, and her suspicions were realized. The lights weren’t just flickering in her room; rows and rows of streetlamps, restaurant signs, and even car headlights were turning on and off.

 

“C’mon, girly… you can do it…” This was the one part of things that Marcy was always most worried about, that something would happen or something would break before her PC located a suitable world. It would’ve been a much quicker and simpler process if she’d just picked one she’d visited already, but there was nothing quite like the novelty of bringing calamity to an all new universe.

 

At once, the rows and rows of auto-generated triplets of coordinates erased themselves, leaving with 51263, 39056, 11911.

 

“YES!”

 

Marcy pumped her fist, and glanced out the door. As suspected, the outside world had mostly returned to normal. News outlets would call it a magnetic blip in the planet’s radiosphere. And there, below the three strobe lights of blue, green, and magenta combined atop one spotlight. It wasn’t even a meter wide, but anyone who looked at it would be shocked, as it could only be… a portal to another world.

 

“Oh yeah, baby…” Marcy had to stop herself from licking her lips. The portal revealed a crisscross section of streets, buildings, cars… from this distance it was even possible to discern some lazy-looking clouds that floated just beneath the portal’s aperture. One such cloud, perhaps curious at the sudden hole in the space time continuum, lurked upward into the portal before the suction pulled it out of its home world and into the atmosphere of Marcy’s room. A moment later, the moisture-laden cloud dissipated into a wisp, then into nothing at the immense heat that her PC tower put out.

 

“Coooool… so cool!” Marcy slid back into her gaming chair. Apprehension burst from her pores in a sheen of sweat. Despite the unfathomable, immense power she now held, some nerves were unavoidable, and she had to take deep breaths and a swig of water to get ahold of herself.

 

“Okay, Marce… focus…”

 

Keeping her eyes trained on the portal, Marcy tapped and held the “down” key on her keyboard’s directional pad. In response, the portal seemed to ‘zoom’ in at supersonic speeds. The moving flecks which Marcy had previously only understood as “cars” in the abstract sense became pill-sized motor vehicles pumping life through the cityscape that grew nearer and nearer. And more importantly… the creatures outside those cars made themselves perceptible as people. Plenty of the universes Marcy had visited when she was still tweaking the algorithm were only populated by non-sapient beasts, if they had higher-order life at all. The risk of spending all that power only for the algorithm to return a dud planet was a big reason Marcy tended to err toward making return trips to coordinates she’d already deemed viable.

 

But this time she got lucky. Or, perhaps despite her misgivings, she really had perfected the machine and its protocol. Perhaps it really was ready to give her exactly what she wanted, whenever she wanted.

 

This was a cause for celebration. And Marcy stared down hungrily at the portal as she raised one sneakered foot above the dimensional aperture…

 

***

 

It was extremely, extremely easy to miss the bizarre disappearance of the stratus cloud if you weren’t looking at that exact patch of sky at the time, which most of the citizens were not. Those who were looking were so bewildered that many were inclined to believe it was a trick of the light, or a bizarre meteorological phenomenon.

 

None of them would’ve predicted that this cloud’s disappearance was only an omen of what would come. Or that “what would come”, in this case, was a sneaker big enough to flatten a subdivision underneath its grimy treads. The collective hush, followed by the collective shriek of fear and the collective rumble as thousands of pairs of legs futilely sought to escape the impact zone were all imperceptible to this shoe’s owner, as the ankle and pantleg seemed to disappear into thin air. For all this city could tell, it was as if a cheeky, teleporting god had chosen it for summary extermination.

 

Then:

 

THUD…

 

Silence, mostly. The impact was absorbed into the planet’s crust, making the actual volume of the shockwave unexpectedly quiet. Relatively, at least. There was still a sonic boom, followed by the catastrophic crumbling of billions of dollars’ worth of skyscrapers, followed by the crumpling of thousands of cars, followed by the bone-cracking and splattering of the many tens of thousands of people caught in the midst of it all… but when it was finished and they were all grinded down into a grey-brown paste that conformed to the underside of this young woman’s sneaker sole… the audible sound of it felt anticlimactic from an onlooker’s perspective.

 

A dull scrape echoed for miles in any direction as the shoe rubbed a streak through the heart of what had once been a bustling metropolis, but was now a disaster zone. A couple more streaks for good measure, and without any preamble or warning, the shoe (and the foot presumably encased within) retracted itself, disappearing through the invisible portal from whence they came, leaving behind insurmountable costs in damage and a five-digit body count. If you could consider people reduced to viscera and meat scraps amid debris and charred rubble “bodies”.

 

***

 

“Ohhhh ho-ho-ho…!” Marcy chuckled huskily as she grabbed at her foot and turned it over her knee. She craned her back as she inspected her sneaker’s sole. There was a clear, grid-like pattern superimposed upon the bottom of the shoe, and a chill seeped into her heart when she realized that she was essentially looking at the former map of the city. A map that would certainly be forever altered as a result of her actions.

 

She didn’t know why she found so much joy in this. Maybe her time as the Core had left a greater impact than she would’ve liked to think. Maybe the reasons the Core selected her were a bit more intrinsic, and this was always something that Marcy delighted in, deep down. But there was something… something… about having the power to bring cities to her knees as a colossus… that gave her the good kind of goosebumps.

 

Marcy sighed. She knew that Sasha or even Anne would get a hell of a kick out of this. If she could convince them that it wasn’t absolutely crazy. But Marcy felt like she’d just gotten her friends back and atoned for her actions in Amphibia. She wasn’t ready to jeopardize that so soon… no matter how much she wanted to share this with the only people in the world she cared about.

 

Marcy sighed, and then she shook her head. What was she talking about? This wasn’t any time to be sad! This was a time for fun!

 

Marcy pulled the lace of her shoe in one stroke and slipped it off. An earthy scent rose from her sock-enclosed feet, enough to make her cringe as she slipped the garment off and revealed a set of gangly toes. Tossing both the shoe and the sock aside, Marcy edited the coordinates of the portal slightly before turning her attention to it once more.

 

 

***

 

Halfway across the horizon, the denizens of another city were reckoning with seeing a massive shoe jut out of the stratosphere and wipe several square miles off the map. The conversation was in hushed and low tones, and the people were anxiously checking TV social media, and all other communications channels to get in contact with loved ones and to ensure this wasn’t a hoax or publicity stunt of any kind. Though it was hard to argue with Richter Scale tremors that were still pulsating aftershocks.

 

And then the next one happened.

 

The skies were clear, so this time there was no warning when the massive, olive-tinted foot eclipsed the sky. People for miles and miles stared, horror and dread and despair and madness on their faces as the foot lowered, and lowered, and lowered. Its scent was unmistakably salty, and the humidity that it emitted was almost choking. As before, attempts to run and hide were pointless, so in one final fit of desperation, these citizens turned to their own loved ones for comfort and physical touch.

 

The toes wiggled and scrunched as the atmospheric breeze flossed through their gaps. The first skyscraper touched the ball of the foot, sending a ticklish twitch through the rest of the unyielding sole. Until…

 

Impact.

 

Just like before, the foot sunk with a muted finality into the moist, supple ground. Some of the citizens had hoped the softness of an apparently “human” foot would be preferable to being trapped inside the collapsing skyscrapers. Those people were incorrect; there was simply no place of refuge from Marcy’s foot, though perhaps the experience of being reduced to a stain would’ve been more pleasurable if rendered through contact with the foot of a woman as young and attractive as she.

 

But it didn’t matter. When Marcy lifted her foot up from the print, a stray river had already begun filling one of the divots created by the five toe-prints. The sole proper was now a bean-shaped outline of ruddy reddish-brown. And just like before, as Marcy extracted her foot from the portal, there was an unmistakable gridlike pattern of all the buildings, streets, boroughs, and intersections that she’d erased with just her singular, powerful foot.

 

***

 

“Wh-aow!” Marcy grinned. She was already inputting the coordinates for a new city to reduce to rubble, but another dimming of her dorm lightbulb was a warning. She couldn’t do this all day.

 

“Okey dokey… that could be enough for now…” Marcy disengaged the lamps and reset her PC, making sure to save the coordinates in the program for future visitations. “Ahhhhh…”

 

The sensation of power. It reminded her so much of when the gemstones had granted her their strength. It reminded her of her time as the Core – it wasn’t all bad. In fact, most of it wasn’t bad. Not for Marcy anyway. If she could just convince her friends Anne and Sasha to come over, join in on the fun…

 

Meh. That was a battle for another day. For the time being, Marcy had to wash herself and go to sleep. Slaughtering thousands of innocents was intense no matter how detached you felt doing it, and if she got enough rest here and now, she’d have twice the stamina tomorrow for twice the worlds!