It was yet another night where Aurora was hunched over her computer like a shrimp, face lined with exhaustion and eyes straining to keep open. But this was different.

Aurora Sevallis was 22, just out of college and horrifically jobless. Freelancing was just not doing it, and her lack of steady employment was clearly taking a toll on her health. She was pale, fairly slender and ate pretty terribly. None of that ever seemed to be a particularly large problem for her, but everyone else she knew seemed to think she was wasting away.

Maybe she was, that didn’t matter now. Even her lack of employment didn’t matter now. She’d come upon something…strange.

“Girl, you need to go to sleep. It’s clearly making you think all crazy.” Her friend Adria had told her while they were on facetime. She was probably right, at least partially. But something was really nagging at Aurora.

To start it off, she was skilled and trained in social media promotion; she’d been looking for jobs in that field for the past few months. Suddenly, almost every girl she knew talked about how this gym they’d started to go to advertised extensively on social media; it was probably a good gig judging by how much traction the posts got they figured.

They were all going to the same all-women gym, which was weird. It was this new chain that had suddenly popped up ouy of nowhere. Aurora had looked it up based off their recommendation and…

It was called Pump Queens. In reference to, like, the pump you get from a workout or something. And good lord, no wonder the marketing got buzz. Aurora rolled her eyes so hard she could’ve knocked down a set of pins with them.

The bespectacled, raven haired young woman was no stranger to sex appeal in advertisements but this was seriously stretching the limits of what you could show in an ad.

The women were all gorgeous of course; with utterly perfect bodies. Tight, washboard abs and thick muscled arms. As well as thighs, glutes and tight, dense with muscle ass cheeks; all almost comically large. Screw not skipping leg day, every day must’ve been leg day.

Not that having a nice body was inherently sexual, Aurora wasn’t a prude. But all of the ads were clearly suggestive, to put it mildly. All the exercises showed off their asses or their crotches. Like the one where the woman jumps up to the elevated bar thingy and her ass cheeks jiggle and clap as she does so.

Gratuitous closeups and constantly showing their squats and rear-focused poses as they went up and down, up and down. Bouncing, bouncing, bouncing…Ahem.

All of them of course dressed in the most absurdly tight and revealing athletic clothes ever, it was practically fetish gear. All the yoga pants gave them comically intense wedgies and the bands of some of their underwear poked out, saying Pump Queen followed by the person’s name. “Pump Queen Jess”, one of them said. Give me a break, Aurora thought.

Aurora didn’t even want to get started on the jumpsuits or the tiny sports bras.

The worst part was the captions though. It was all faux-motivational stuff about empowering women to build themselves, grow their bodies and become the woman they wanted to be. This place was clearly for extremely self conscious women that got confidence from sexualizing and objectifying themselves.

And it wasn’t niche or anything, ordinary women from all over were buying into it, including seemingly everyone Aurora knew.

“Chase that pump! Let’s get PUMPED! Let’s grow those glutes! Find your Bounce with Pump Queens! Build the booty you desire and become a Pump Queen! We love to see our gals glowing and growing! Let’s get drenched with sweat! Nothing feels better than embracing the PUMP”. Shit like that.

Aurora went back to the videos, they were borderline erotic. Beyond the suggestive poses and angles the women were red faced, lips parted and eyes unfocused. Gym clothes completely soaked in sweat, clinging even tighter to their bodies. Their breaths were sharp and their groans were long and labored. They were meant to be groans and sighs of exertion but it sounded different to Aurora’s ears.

Maybe she was just tired and stressed. Was this some weird conspiracy, or just marketing that had clearly done its job? It’d gotten practically every woman in the city to sign up (The basic introductory classes were free, which was probably a large part of it), so it obviously worked.

Build a better you, the website said. Ahem. This place still bugged her, though. For a place that just popped up it’d gotten too huge too fast. Multiple locations with numerous floors that looked almost more like skyscrapers than gyms. And they had their own clothing brand that was incredibly viewed on social media too, every post displaying a handful of different Pump Queen models in each one.

The models advertised the clothes that advertised the gym that advertised the models and their accounts. Thousands of fitness influencers/models popped up over night, all being new Pump Queens gym goers that had suddenly become obsessed with fitness and “building a better you”. Every other post advertised either the gym or the clothing line and all the posts regardless existed to show off their bodies.

What the hell kind of scheme was this place; businesses don’t just get this huge and popular over night, right?

Aurora gulped as she received a text from her friend Grayson. The asexual, Hawaiian shirt wearing nerd that never exercised a day in her life nor had ever had any interest in appearing attractive.

“Hey I know u aren’t interested in going to the gym but I think they r hiring on social media”. She texted. Aurora had actually sent an application just to see what they’d send back. And she had gotten a reply.

It said that they were impressed with her resume and that she’d get the job if she went down to one of their locations to get a feel of the place. To see what Pump Queens stands for, what they’re all about. Fuck, she was waiting for her better judgement to take over but she was already writing a response to accept the offer.

God, what the hell was she getting into?

(Hope you liked this little short teaser of a first chapter! Started as a roleplay idea with someone else but they gave me permission to make a story based on it).