Two kilometres south-west of the millions gathering on the steppes lay a junkyard of broken caravans and wagons, which had been arranged for mysterious reasons in a spiral configuration like a snake devouring its own tail.

  The site seemed to have been abandoned, but there were traces of a recent human presence. Footprints of a crisp outline dented trails of salt spread superstitiously around the vehicles, and the leather of the empty draft harnesses had yet to be eaten by scavengers. Here and there, on both the ground and the sides of caravans, were dark splotches, still moist. A pyre in the site’s centre retained some heat, having cooled to body temperature, and this body temperature ash was only just beginning to scatter on the irregular gusting of the savannah winds.

  Next to the junkyard, screening it partially from the view of the distant gathering, stood a one-story complex of earthen buildings. These were linked by tunnels, and their exterior walls were coated with what appeared to be the world's sloppiest paint job.

  From this complex, a group of fifty-or-so shadows emerged and fanned out through the junkyard. They moved through the area stealthily, leapfrogging between vehicles, their frontrunners investigating the interiors by peeping through windows or rolling into doorways. There was an eerie absence of chatter.

  A set of caravans in the junkyard's centre had been chained together with their entry points closed off by a thick sealant of spell-manipulated earth. This was surrounded by two squads. Boosted hearing detected nothing inside, but they stayed cautious. When one shadow found a manhole-sized opening in the roof, a pet lioness was brought up to sniff inside. She confirmed a recent scent. Dropping down, she prowled the interior, but after a moment gave a grunt signalling nothing. Two of the shadows jumped in next, cracking open cabinets and swiping some forgotten knick-knacks - a set of porcelain cups, a floral-print cushion, a 20-kilogram sack of spicy chips.

  As those two and the lioness rejoined the others sneaking towards another site, none of the humans noticed that the animal's hairs remained bristling, her head pivoting continuously backwards in alarm.

  The paranoia wasn’t wrong, another person having been in there with them the whole time – a very special person, missed in his invisibility due to his much higher stats.

  The ex-hero was currently wedged snug between a caravan’s ceiling and the top of a cabinet. These random people happened to have jump-scared him while charging his shield before the next skip in his retirement travels. Rather than introduce himself as someone with a normal social IQ might, he’d taken to hiding like a rodent, perhaps still not wishing to be inundated with requests for autographs.

  Outside, the shadows, concluding falsely that they were alone, relaxed their discipline. Fifty helmets were desummoned at once, and an accompanying whipping off of hairbands and flourishing of curls revealed that they were all girls - all pretty, fit, and college aged, like some kind of in-game sorority.

  Instead of leaving as the ex-hero hiding might have wished, the sorority dispersed chaotically around the junkyard. A reggae hit was turned on via projection, several girls singing along out of key. Multiple conversations split off, one girl complaining about the lack of bathing options, another fawning over a cute boy hooked up with at a recent surf competition. The 20-kilogram sack of scavenged spicy chips passed hand to hand. Other pickings from their search were dumped into a collective pile, and the girls took turns selecting pieces for themselves, the hottest items being clothes and the jewellery from a trunk concealed beneath a caravan's false floor.

  One girl—without any boys she thought in sight—stripped off her top, exposing a body covered in hand-inked henna tattoos. She leaned nakedly against a crate, and a friend, the sorority's artist, copied a mural from the side of a nearby caravan. The original portrayed a Moses-like scene of a newborn sailing on a driftwood raft. It'd been freckled with arrow-shaped dents, which inspired the artist to turn her own baby into an obscene porcupine.

  The group were eventually wrangled by one girl with a tightly-bound ponytail and teeth contoured slightly too flat. She announced that their assignment was complete and awarded praise to two sisters for outstanding performances. Following that, she called a vote on whether they should record a dance video before returning to the larger gathering. Fifty hands shot up and waggled in uniform assent.

  Hairbrushes, concealers, mascaras, lipsticks, and more poured out of inventories as they styled themselves. Their armour was traded for a clashing mix of partywear, many outfits being accented by their newly salvaged thrifts. The artist who’d drawn the henna tattoos shapeshifted into one of the creatures of the inner steppe, a bear-sized armadillo that stood bipedally, with elephant-like tusks dragging down to waist height. Another member, with a child’s avatar, adorned a frilly pink dress, transforming herself into a living princess doll. This girl, with a princess’s perfectionism and indifference to the input of others, went on to scout for filming locations, an accompanying lackey helping her to install mood lighting with stones of an indigo and violet glow.

  From the window of his caravan, the ex-hero studied these developments in disbelief. That emotion darkened to another when the sorority spread around the site to dance.

  Their dance was—in four words—ridiculous, offensive, trashy trash. It consisted of a sequence of spins, sideways bends, and flailing limbs, the last stiff and angular as a salute to the Führer. A stupidly fast tempo outraced the music by about 60 beats, with the girls sporadically doubling their speed through Boost, and the resulting seizure caused continuous collisions. All the while, as they stumbled on each other and ate their sisters’ fists, they maintained a psychopathic stare at the girls filming, their faces blank, their eyes joyless.

  The style was called ‘The Cool Cool Cripple’. It’d been trending in the local nightclubs after a viral clip of a certain figure doing a warm-up dance before his training, many finding hilarity in the incongruity between his movements and his expression. The secret to The Cool Cool Cripple, as had been fervently discussed on the forums, was adopting the correct mindset - one had to envision themselves performing at gunpoint in a concentration camp while ailing from a stomach bug.

  All of this was quite familiar to the local Roboboomers, although not to the ex-hero watching stupefied.

  This sorority, perhaps cheerleaders in real life, ornamented the conventional form of The Cool Cool Cripple with gymnastic manoeuvres, flipping off objects and dropping into crotch-slamming splits. The princess-doll member was launched onto the shoulders of the armadillo, and the pair deftly continued to seizure while somehow keeping balance.

  Although the style of dance was in poor taste, the execution of it was impressive. For the first time, it seemed that there was something special in this group, something that—if fostered through the correct trials of adventure—could mature into heroism. Maybe – it was important not to get too carried away after so many previous failed predictions. But wasn’t it possible? One could imagine the rough shape of their journey: a dance troupe touring cities, overcoming heroic quests along the way with hot-girl chemistry, going viral maybe for one of their clips, maybe letting the fame of virality inflate their egos too much and splitting like 2046’s sorely-missed girl group sensation, Twisty Nix, maybe—unlike Twisty Nix, for whom fans still held hope—reuniting later after recognising that their solo projects were mediocre tripe and that they’d been their best and truest and only selves when together - as sisters.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Such may, possibly, have been the direction of this introductory setup.

  The sorority's dance shifted from location to location, the girls seizuring stoically on top of caravans, the girls seizuring stoically in front of the pyre of human-temperature ash. After one move, Ponytail had them pull out several items that appeared to be Legendaries, although the whispered complaints of one girl exposed these to be counterfeits.

  As fakes, they were quite convincing, replicating even the magical auras emitted from such artefacts. How the girls had got such items was not apparent, but they employed them expertly as dance props. One girl stabbed a strawberry-coloured spear into the ground and used it for pole-dancing spins. Another, posing with a dagger that apparently swapped outfits, imitated the effect by desummoning her clothes while moving behind the giant armadillo as a screen.

  Another started to twerk in a pair of crystal-studded leggings, but she suddenly broke down into ugly tears. As her sisters gathered around her for comfort, she shared how she’d first met her ex-boyfriend with the same booty-shaking move. They tried to console her by insulting that guy and saying he must’ve been too small and insecure to handle her big-booty fierceness, but that only exacerbated her tears. So—her leggings confiscated as the others resumed their dance—she was escorted behind a caravan by a sister, and the two resolved her troubles in private by snorting an orange powder off their forearms and plotting feverishly to assassinate the guy.

  Unbeknownst to the sorority, they’d become locked during their dance in a hijinks-filled stealth game of cat-and-mouse with the ex-hero.

  Figuring they wouldn’t leave, he’d been trying to relocate to a spot discreet enough to gather charges undetected. However, any time he’d found a spot, they’d soon migrated over, scaring him off with their sad-faced parody. The two girls currently snorting and plotting had just ousted him again, and if either had raised their noses slightly, they might’ve spotted him marching at the present into a caravan with his arms raised in question to the sky, a stack of weapons floating in behind him.

  Once inside, he peeped out through a window on the scene of the dancing college girls. His expression turned sullen and pensive, indicating perhaps a contemplation of what he’d done wrong in life to earn this mockery or what might be the role of this sorority within the saga, whether they might be his heroic successors or his something else.

  They could be something else, considering that the scheme of heroism had thus far flubbed and might continue to flub. Maybe one of these college beauties was his next romance. Or maybe all of them were - maybe the next phase of retirement for him would be building a demented post-maximalist harem surpassing the historical greats of Genghis Khan and Elon Musk. Such seemed as realistic at this point as them dancing their way into heroism.

  After much deliberation, the ex-hero added to the situational confusion by summoning a bag of dead cats and dishing them out like a hand of tarot cards.

  Why did he have a bag of dead cats?

  Why was he dishing out these dead cats like a hand of tarot cards?

  No answer was forthcoming. However, given the context and the delicate manner of his handling, he may have been planning to cook the bag of dead cats for his new harem in a socially-absurd attempt to win their fifty hearts at once.

  Outside, the group had paused after the girl who’d complained of the fakes had lost her zest for dancing. When interrogated, she mumbled that it was just kind of embarrassing twerking and poledancing with a bunch of counterfeits - the whole thing made her feel like a broke slut.

  This triggered a lecture from the girl with the tight ponytail. These fakes, she claimed, weren’t truly fake because each symbolised their collective share in the real items, distributed amongst The People according to an equitable, needs-based basis. By flaunting the fakes proudly, they were advertising the fundamental difference in their economic organisation from the enemy, who’d monopolised all his treasures onto his capitalo-fascist person, and their dance thus became a form of revolutionary protest.

  Most of the sorority happened to be from Europe, which meant they were orthodox Technocommunists.

  “And that’s that!” Ponytail concluded, pointing her fake dagger at another girl. “Not one word, Reesa!”

  That last order had been aimed at one of the dancers, who’d so far said and done nothing.

  This girl had a face as delicate and pale as an elf. From her neck dangled a protestant cross, marking her out from the rest of her sisters as one of 2050’s stubborn holdouts in faith. And she also had—although this was NOT she would insist her defining feature, much less so than her religion, and she’d seriously debated shrinking them after just thoughtlessly copying them from IRL—a pair of enormous breasts. Along with having an identified name unlike the others, her massive, authentically gigantic boobs marked her out in an even more special way. She was, potentially, the next hero, embodying an upgrade from the dreary theme of flatness - it may be mountains from now on, two of them.

  Huge-boobs gave an accused grimace. “Bro, I didn’t say anything.”

  “Yeah, but you were on the verge,” warned ponytail. “The contrarian aura is overflowing. But not now, Reesa. We’ve settled this already: this is the time for uniting not debating.”

  Breasts Breasts shrugged as if she’d given up, her chest visibly shaking, but she couldn’t help slipping out one quick verbal jab. “I just don’t think it’s fair to cast stones after stooping to psychic enslavement.”

  The other sorority girls groaned in chorus.

  “That’s all I’m saying,” she continued. “We can’t maintain the moral high ground when brainwashing millions and marching them to die. We are the bad guys now.”

  Tongues tsked, heads shook, spicy chips crunched in gritted teeth. One girl told her to stop being a contrarian, vibe-sniping bimbo.

  The busty girl held course. “Also, our leader likes to eat children – so much so that he circumvented the game mechanics to preserve their bodies for that purpose. We are, not even subtly, the bad guys. That’s fine, everyone – it’s fine to be the bad guys in a videogame, but I think we should acknowledge that rather than trying to have our cake and eat them, too. Or children - he eats children.”

  Whatever these bizarre remarks meant, the group was not receptive. Glares and catty whispers demanded her to apologise for disrupting their harmony, to stop acting as a useful stooge, if not enthusiastic collaborator, for some enemy’s psyop campaign.

  The mood seemed nearing violence, but a Jamaican member with a 7-foot-tall avatar and athletic suaveness pacified everyone by gathering them and making them link hands in a sisterly circle. The group then—in a bizarre ritual of reconciliation that didn't seem new from the lack of comments on its absurdity—took turns sharing what they personally most despised about the ex-hero. A nerd, he was labelled, a fascist, a reject, an elitist windbag, an ugly turd, a clown who took nothing seriously, a dork devoid of humour, a vampire sympathiser if not vampire himself, this latest psyop being pure projection. One crying girl—different from the other one crying earlier and now high on in-game crack—flamed the former hero’s bland haircut, recalling an abusive ex with a similar slovenliness; another girl expanding on this explained that the ex-hero’s trash haircut was both a symbolic rejection of progress and a misogynistic denigration of the extra self-care practices of women. The large-breasted girl, after some coaxing, offered that she didn’t much care for his blaspheming and that a leader, without a proper moral foundation, could never build anything of lasting virtue, their corruption rippling down to any followers and turning them into hypocritical sycophants.

  With each of these confessions, the state of sorority was restored, proving how a common enemy can unite even the most fractured hearts of men. But, oh, pity for the teen himself, listening to this abuse as he apparently stir-fried cats for their affection. His harem arc was starting on a dire note.

  When the sorority had finished bonding over their mutual hatred of him, ponytail concluded: “And let us all remember that the mindslaves are not regressive. This is how we activate the lumpenprole and create a true, people-led movement rather than appealing to the material support of bourgeois saboteurs. History is on our side!”

  The debate settled, they returned to filming their dance, limbs jerking and bopping, faces constipated.

  The pet lioness, lounging in the background, suddenly began to growl a warning, hearing something nearby, something creaking in the dark.

  Her owner, caught up in the dance, told it to hush. “Calm down, Sonya, it’s just Amani and Glow!”

  The two who’d separated earlier, the crier and the comforter, stepped into the light with a party-girl whoop, their arms linked as they resumed the dance, their eyeballs a bright neon orange.

  But the pet lioness didn’t stop growling – neither of them being what it heard.

  Its warnings, alas, were drowned out and ignored beneath the other girls whooping back.

  It was then that a cloaked shape leapt out from the shadows behind the two rejoining, its arms raised high above their heads. It held a two-handed sword, the blade of which was shimmering as it vacuumed up energy.