At 7:15 AM GMT, somewhere just off the eastern coast of California, Flight A447 commences its takeoff from the near-deserted gates of the Los Angeles International Airport.
This was far from the usual protocol. Normally, around this time, any and all international flights were strictly prohibited, citing "unpredictable conditions unsuitable for flight". If anyone wished to make such a flight, they would have to do so in the dead of night. However, there were some flights that were just too urgent to hold off. Flights that could not be delayed or postponed at any costs, fights which were essential to the functioning of society.
Flights which could mean the difference between prosperity and poverty, success and failure, life and death.
For those passengers and those passengers alone, a special flight was chartered just to make sure that they would be able to get where needed in the nick of time and not a moment more.
Everyone knew the risks, of course. You didn't just go out of you way to defy protocol, especially considering why it was set up in the first place. These people, by any other metric, would be considered suicidal. But sometimes, there were things that just had to be done, and there was no other time than now to do them.
Even if it meant chancing an encounter with Juni Sanders.
As the plane climbed further and further up, they could already see for themselves precisely what they had to reckon with. Once more, on a clear autumn morning, right where the coast opened into the Pacific Ocean, the skyline was completely and utterly dominated by an infinite plane of upward-sloping pink, so vast that it stretched beyond the horizons. From all sides, there was no beginning, no end to it. There was no hope of putting a form to it, of associating the unrelenting pink with anything familiar. There was nothing but the edge of what everyone knew was just the bottom rim of one of Juni's toes.
Perhaps at some point during its long journey, the plane would make it halfway up to the middle rim, but no more.
Looking down, passengers could bear witness for themselves how a fathomless shadow, so deep and all-encompassing that you could taste it, instantly coated every last corner of their worlds as they lazily drifted besides it, staying as far away as the little plane could manage. Looking up, far beyond where any lingering clouds would dare tread, there was no hope of at least putting a structure to her, of seeing her in all her full majesty. There was just a pillar, just a form, going up and up towards the hazy silhouette that might be a teenage girl. No matter where they looked from what little they could see from their tiny port-view windows, there was no escaping her.
Such was the pure, unsolicited power and might of Juni Sanders. Any may God help Los Angelas, because today was Juni's first day of high school.
~~~
On August 28th, Monday morning, sometime around 7:17 AM GMT, Juni Sanders stands some ways off the coast of Los Angelas, looking down at the place where she would begin her twelfth year of education. Or at least, she assumed that her school was somewhere down there; from her vantage point, all that she could really see was an indistinguishable blob of grey checker-patterned squares, all spread out like some kind of synthetic mold eating away at the lush, green linen on the other side.
Hard to believe that something like this would be called "The City of Angels", but she wasn't one to judge - nothing was really all that impressive from her vantage point.
Idly, the "petite" Asian girl mused over how exactly she was going to approach this. Looking down, she could see the entirety of Los Angelas lined down beneath her like a termite's nest. At her size, there were no such things as buildings or landmarks - all she could see were indistinguishable solid patches of grey, geometric gravel squeezed together in abstract shapes and patterns, all held together by hundreds, if not thousands of tiny, narrow lines crisscrossing one another in a dense, orderly web. Really, how was she going to make out her high school amidst the mess, let alone hear what her professors and classmates were saying?
Well, no matter - she would simply find it, and she would bring it to her. She just needed to be meticulous about it.
She looked up and saw the sun begin to climb past the curvature of the planet, its light casing a long, gaping shadow for hundreds if not thousands of miles north-west from where she stood. Comparing the position of the sun to the length of her shadow that gave her... about 20 minutes until her first class. Just enough time for her to find where exactly the high school was. Of course, by doing this, she would be cutting it close, but fortunately she had already memorized which district her school was located. All she had to do was to find it, and she would already by 70% of the way there.
First, though, she had to get a closer look.
Slowly, Juni crouched down towards the city, her knees carefully angled outwards such that she would be able to keep the entirety of Los Angelas between her legs. The descending mass of skin effortlessly carved through vast stretches of land like a knife through a one-layer cake, cutting off Los Angelas from the rest of the world in a single slice. In an instant, the low-lying, flat costal city had been transformed into the most impenetrable valley the world had ever seen, her shins cresting up beyond the clouds as monolithic plateaus of skin that made even the tallest of mountains look like pebbles. In a few hours' time, when Juni inevitably left for the day, the impression left by her legs would irreconcilably leave it as an island city, surrounded on all sides by cavernous, miles-deep gorges that would be quickly filled in by the ocean nearby.
How the people would commute now was a question that Juni had no time to concern herself with; not when she's almost reached her school! Now that she was on her knees, all she had left to do was to lean her head down, and try to make out which district her school was in.
As she leaned closer and closer towards the city, thousands of buildings getting remorselessly battered from the overwhelming amount of displaced air her head alone was generating, she could take some small comfort in the fact that, at this moment, millions of people had no choice but to ogle at the titanic crotch that had replaced the entirety of the coastline. That was, of course, assuming that they could see much of anything of note other than a flat plane of white. With that in mind, she considered herself fortunate that she was able to "convince" the world's governments to commission her some clothes to get through the day with at least some modesty. Granted, the methods she used were rather crude, but they got the job done in the end.
To be frank, what she got couldn't really be called "clothing": it was a very skimpy two-piece nylon white bikini, with a thinly laced thong and a sliding triangle top. Actually, she was being generous in calling what she had a thong; all it really was a thin strip of white covering that left very little to the imagination. The only reason that she didn't end up classifying it as a G-string was because there was just enough fabric present to ensure that she wasn't simply wearing a narrow strap of thread.
She didn't mind, of course. She liked her bikini. A lot. Besides, it wasn't like most people were going to see much of anything other than her toes most of the time, anyway.
Eventually, she managed to get her eyes as close as she could possibly manage to the city without outright kissing the ground. Here, she could finally make out some of the smaller details that could never have hope to make out otherwise - for one, she could actually see each tiny building individually instead of as an indistinguishable blob, and how to how they swayed in rhythm with her breathing, occasionally dissipating in a puff of dust. As she absent-mindedly blew away some stray cumulus clouds that were covering her vision, she could see how the earth visibly rippled in response to the powerful windstorms she generated as she did so. Of course, she had no way of knowing of the hundreds, if not thousands of people who found their possessions (or themselves) being blown away, hurtling towards oblivion, but that was far from her main concern.
What was concerning was that she could see the district that her high school was in, and she could even make out the campus itself, but how exactly would she be able to "get in"? The most that she was told was where her high school was, and that "everything would be taken care" of.
The question was, was she patient enough to wait and see what they meant, or would Juni take matters into her own hands?
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