The Gift of Growth

Trace briefly struggled to get free. It was fruitless – not only was he pinned beneath the bulk of this well-endowed hyper mare (and trying not to think too much about how naked he was and how much other naked skin he was making contact with), but the firm hands gripping his upper arms prevented any side-to-side shimmying. With no option to panic available, he settled for nervously looking back up into those eyes and stammering, “Uh… Um… Hi?”

He'd had better opening lines. Or not.

“Hi,” the mare said back in a low, tomboyish voice, grinning smugly and baring her fangs. There was a slight curl to the long thestral tongue just visible past the sharp teeth, as though she was restraining herself from licking her chops.

Having lived a mostly sheltered and unexciting diurnal life in Ponyville, Trace was barely aware of the existence of thestrals. The word ‘bat-pony’ came to mind, and he wondered, Is that offensive? I think I read somewhere that they find the term ‘bat-pony’ a little offensive. In his current position, he didn't think offensive was a good strategy. The thestrals had apparently been ‘brought back’ by Princess Luna’s return, whatever that meant… Otherwise, they were considered to be just another of ponykind’s distinct varieties. If rare.

In theory. There was a lot of thestral on him right now.

This thestral was, on closer inspection… kind of cute. Her face was round and her muzzle short, giving her a girlish appearance. There was, though, a faint sharpening of features around her cheeks and eyes, suggesting a hidden, lethal perceptiveness. Her mane, a deep purple, was short and messy, hairs pointing in whatever direction they felt like, adding to her rascal-y vibe. The rest of her, though, was pure, powerful hyper. Especially the massive, luscious breasts pressing into all of his naked torso, with only what seemed to be a skimpy, transparent negligee separating his flesh from hers.

Her ears swiveled forwards and a long smirk played over those prominent (especially in Trace's hindbrain) fangs. “It’s alright, I’ll wait,” the mare who had him in a pin said teasingly, after a few moments of Trace’s eyes darting in every direction trying to figure this all out. She leaned her head down, squishing the otherwise rather… exciting… heft of her breasts between their bodies even more, and added sultrily, “We’ve got allllllll niiiiiight.”

Despite Trace’s fears – the leftover terror from the nightmare, the shock of getting tackled by a stranger, the apprehension of having a big, beautiful hyper mare on top of him – he gathered enough of his wits to realize that he needed to speak. “Wh-Who are you?” he croaked out.

“Mist Melody, at your service!” she replied, performing a mock salute right in front of Trace’s face. “Lunar Guard, Dream Warden division.”

“Dr-Dream…?” Trace’s eyes widened. Despite being pinned down by a sexy mare, now was the time to panic. If she was a real dreamwalker, one of Luna’s guards, that meant she’d seen… everything!

Mist rolled her eyes and relaxed her grip on Trace’s arms as the earth pony squirmed backwards, dragging his body rather nicely against hers… and fell right off the cloud. Thankfully, their perch was close to the ‘ground,’ which had taken the form of a semi-solid lake of glass in a pinkish-purple nebula, so the damage from Trace’s fall was limited to a bonk on the head. Which thankfully caused ripples across the glass, rather than shattering the surface.

With the cloud all to herself, Mist laid herself across it and kicked up a long, chiseled leg playfully. Trace’s lower body was still propped up, showing his half-erect six-inch stallionhood for the dream-world to see. Mist smirked and gave it an interested tap with her finger.

“Gaaah!” Trace scrambled up to his feet and swung his short green tail around to his front, holding its strands fitfully with his hands in front of his bits to cover his shame.

Mist Melody rested her chin on her hand. “Relaaax. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before. Kinda cute, too. And you’re not in trouble for the dreams, either. We don’t arrest folks for thought-crimes. Besides…” The gray thestral winked and put her other finger in front of her lips. “I’m off the clock right now. Shhh!”

Despite his quaking knees, Trace’s eyes wandered. With the mare laid on her front, that light gray cleavage was pointed straight at him like a cannon. The black lingerie wasn’t hiding anything. She had to be even bustier than Orchid Blossom… and judging by how far away those feet were, maybe even a little taller, too. Every limb bulged with powerful muscle, smoothed out by just the slightest layer of feminine softness.

The thestral grinned and flipped over on the cloud, now laying on her back with her leathery bat wings spread wide to either side. Now her… O-cups? P-cups? Q-cups?! They were laying on her chest, the negligee holding them together just enough to thrust them high into the air, with those dark gray nipples stabbing upward…

“Enjoying the show?”

Trace winced and pressed the end of his tail tighter against his crotch, trying fruitlessly to tuck his stubbornly hard stallionhood between his legs. “What… What are you doing here?” he deflected.

Looking at him upside-down, Mist smiled and said, “You’re not in legal trouble, not yet, but you are in trouble, aren’tcha? You know what I mean. Job trouble? Life trouble? Feeling-like-you-got-nowhere-else-to-go-but-down trouble?”

His sense of skepticism returning, Trace replied, “And that’s why you’re trying to seduce me…?” He knew dreams didn't make sense, but shouldn't thestrals?

“Nah, I’m trying to seduce you because yer cute,” Mist said with a cat-like grin. “But I’m here because I wanna help.”

“Help…” Trace echoed dully. He’d heard that one before.

“Yep! You don’t wanna go to the Crusaders again and re-figure out your cutie mark because you’re afraid that they hate you for the whole mind control thing. But me? I know better. I’m not gonna turn you away just because of an honest mistake, or because you have fantasies about that sort of thing. Rather scrumptious ones, at that!”

An icy feeling chilled Trace’s veins. “You… You saw…?”

“Oh yeah. I’ve pretty much seen them all.” Out of nowhere, a large tome materialized and Mist opened it up to peruse it. The fact that she used her huge tits as, well, a rack did nothing to help Trace's focus, but he managed to pay enough attention to catch the title of the book, despite arguments coming from his nethers.

Embossed in gold letters on the cover were the words ‘The Big Book of Trace’s Erotic Dreams.’ The amount of glee in her voice as she read off the titles was, if anything, a little intimidating. Frankly, she outright cooed as she said, “There’s the ‘Saddle Arabian Sultan’... ‘Naked Giant in Manehattan’... ‘Makeout with Sexy Fictional Character du jour On the Couch’... ‘The Amazing Elastic Penis’ – hey, you’ve been having that one since you were a teenager, haven’t you?”

Trace recoiled a couple of steps back. “You’ve been stalking me for that long?!” Mental curses began in earnest as he tried to remember if he'd gone anywhere really… Oh, well, if she knew about the Elastic Penis one, it didn't matter if she found the Valley of the Boobs one.

“No no, I– pfft. When you’ve been having a recurring dream long enough, it develops certain markers that a dreamwalker can…” Mist trailed off, tossed the book aside flippantly, and rolled over to her front, squishing her breasts beneath her again. “In the interest of transparency” – she wiggled her eyebrows suggestively at that – “you’ve been on my radar for about fffffour? Four months, yeah. You might remember a night back then where the ‘Sunny Days’ nightmare suddenly turned into ‘Saddle Arabian Sultan’ for no apparent reason. That was me! You’re welcome.”

“Uh… thank you?”

“And hey, that got my little mare in the boat paying attention, and that got me looking around… So as standard procedure, I did a little research, a little background check, to try and figure out why you were having that nightmare so much… And in the process, I learned a couple things. One, I kinda personally sympathize with your situation, and two… the solution to your problems is a liiiiittle more complicated than slashing up a couple of dream-monsters.”

Trace swallowed a lump in his throat and sighed. “Yeah… You got that right.” Complicated. He'd heard that before, too. Usually with bit signs attached.

“I usually do,” Mist replied smugly. She climbed forward and sat up on the cloud. Every movement was a combination of fluidity and coiled strength – so predatory he wondered if thestrals were part griffon. Part of the cloud raised up so she could lay across it on her side like a fainting couch, giving Trace a pin-up profile of her muscular, busty, nightwear-clad body. “So I’ve kept my eye on you since then. Nothing invasive beyond what a Dream Warden is allowed to do; just taking notes on your dreams and coming up with a plan. Now, here we are: You’ve got three weeks until your paychecks dry up, and I’ve got three weeks off work. I can give you my full attention~.”

The earth pony was absolutely flabbergasted and speechless at this point. Here was this beautiful hyper mare, in a lucid dream, claiming to know everything about him and assuring him that she was here to help with all of his troubles. Because that was likely. Part of Trace wanted to believe that he’d finally snapped and this was just a comforting hallucination, but Mist Melody looked so much more vibrant and real than the rest of the dream, which was just a little bit blurry and hazy. So the part of her being a dream-walking Lunar Guard seemed to check out… but where to start on the rest of it?

While Trace debated internally, Mist just kept smiling and resting in a provocative pose, patiently waiting for him to respond. When he was starting to take a little too long, she snorted and finally said, “Well? This is what you wanted, right? You’ve been hoping and praying someone would take notice of your situation. Here I am, offering to help.”

Trace swallowed and furrowed his brow, regaining some of his backbone. Bitter memories circled his mind – and, little did he know, behind his head – reminding him of prior help. He had many problems with this. “‘Help’…” he echoed, shaking his head slightly. He turned his back on her, scowling to himself. “I’ve had enough ‘help.’ I’ve had enough people trying to tell me how to fix my life. It’s never worked.”

He could almost feel the sharklike grin forming on her face behind him. “Then it’s a good thing I’m not going to do that,” she said, an extra layer of confidence (and hunger) in her voice.

Trace turned back around, still holding his tail as a proverbial fig leaf. “What is even your ‘plan,’ then?” The followup he left unspoken: ‘What can you do that professional counselors have tried and failed to do, twice?’

Mist Melody’s smile broadened and her eyes narrowed slightly, and Trace got the sense that she was choosing her words carefully. “Let’s just say… I’ve got a bunch of things for you to try, and depending on how you take to them, that’ll help both of us find what you’re missing. Think of it– yeah! Think of it like a placement test. Except at the end of it, you decide what you’re going to be, not me.” Judging by the way her cheekbones rose, she seemed awfully pleased with herself for this analogy.

Unimpressed, Trace replied, “And what if I say no?”

“No?” Mist responded, just a little bit surprised.

“Yeah. Because this looks sketchy as all Tartarus.”

Mist grimaced a little, but then shrugged, Q-cups wobbling. “Then I guess we never speak again. We go our separate ways. You go back to your dead-end life.” She sat up on the cloud-couch and leaned towards Trace, steepling her fingers beneath her chin and smirking. “Or I keep popping up in your dreams – and nightmares – until you say yes. Whichever’s more fun.”

“S-So I don’t have a choice,” Trace muttered, trying to pretend that he wasn’t kinda scared now. The glint on her fangs, the glow in those night-graced eyes… A quiet, mousy part of him wondered if she was deliberately shaping his dream to emphasize just how threateningly mighty she was.

Not that such a possibility was any less frightening.

“In theory, you do,” Mist pointed out. “You can go back to Crusader Counseling again. See if that garbage job pans out. Apply for openings in Ponyville. Any number of things, really.” She tilted her head, licking that long, pointed tongue around a finger for a moment, then gave Trace kind of a pitying look. “But realistically? If I know you half as well as you think you know yourself? Yeah, this is kinda your only ship in the harbor.”

Trace fell silent and stared sullenly down at the glassy, watery ‘floor.’ She had him there.

Mist Melody regarded him with an unreadable expression for a moment, then stood up. That immediately got Trace’s attention.

When he wasn’t slouching, Trace’s stood at the perfectly acceptable height of 5’9”. Mist Melody, however, not the tallest hyper but still rather tall for one, reached 7’10” easily. Just slightly more than two feet of difference, which put Trace’s eyes approximately level with the point of her sternum – and her sweeping underboob. This was a mare who could easily plant her chest on Trace’s head like a hat, and, despite everything, for a single moment Trace wanted little more than for that to happen.

Mist crossed half the distance between them, increasing Trace’s tension. When she was close enough to be tilting her head down at him, bright eyes peering down over the mountainous peaks of her breasts, she said, “You have my word – my word before the Unbound Moon! – that I won’t bankrupt you, publicly humiliate you, or put you in unnecessary danger.”

‘Unnecessary’?! screamed the panicky alarm bells in Trace’s head.

“Heck, at the end of all this, I won’t even ask for payment,” she purred with a casual shrug. “I know it’s hard to believe when you’re in this kind of situation, but… sometimes, someone offering to help is actually someone offering to help. So–” She offered down at him a large, powerful hand. “–will you take a chance and trust me?”

Trace swallowed another lump in his throat and considered the hand in front of him. More than ever, he felt like he was on the precipice of tumbling into something wildly beyond his control…

But the more he thought about it, the more he had to admit that this frightening and frighteningly attractive hyper thestral had a point. Without intervention, chaos and entropy was where his life was heading anyway. Not straight to Tartarus – straight to Discord. He was hopeless, he was out of options. If he was going to get caught up in an uncertain whirlwind of events either way… maybe the one she was offering could only be better than his.

With a great deal of trepidation, Trace shakily put his hand forward and did his best to grip hers. His fingers didn’t get very far. “Alright.”

Mist shook his hand firmly, just once, and it was enough to nearly knock Trace off-balance. “Great!” she exclaimed, and turned around. “Let’s not waste any time.”

The glassy lake disappeared in a wave of… something, and was replaced with a dark, dimly lit, and poorly organized office. Mist hopped up onto the desk, grabbed a paper and a quill, and started scribbling furiously.

And nakedly. Trace wished that the part of his brain responsible for such observations would shut up. Or at least get his cock to stop throbbing quite so stiffly.

“There is a ton of stuff to get to, and we aren’t even ready to get started,” Mist said excitedly as she wrote, her nips bouncing and wiggling with her chest as she wrote. “But trust me, this is gonna be the best decision you ever made.”

“Woo,” Trace said flatly.

After a suspiciously short amount of scribbling, Mist folded up the letter – it suddenly became enveloped and stamped and everything – and tossed it like a frisbee out an open window into the moonlight. “So while that’s getting rolling,” she said, looking at Trace again, “I just want to set a couple of ground rules tonight. Don’t worry, they’re pretty simple.”

Trace was still naked and vulnerable, and wasn’t feeling much for conversation. “Great…”

“One, do everything I say. And two, no stupid questions, like ‘Why am I doing this?’”

Another alarm bell rang. “Uh, depending on the circumstance, that would actually be a very smart question…”

The thestral let out a little aggravated huff. “Look, I’m just gonna straight-up not tell you shit,” Mist said candidly. “Just accept that. And if I have to dodge every little ‘But whyyyyyy’ question, then that’s gonna take up my entire night – and we got shit to do. So no stupid questions.”

Trace managed a bit of a glare. “This isn’t getting any less shady…”

“It’s not like I’m gonna ask you to assassinate a Princess,” Mist muttered, then shook her head in disbelief. “Though honestly, I’d like to see you fuckin’ try. That’d be hilarious. But no – I’m just gonna ask you to do a lot of stuff that’s gonna seem weird at first, but you gotta do it, and you just gotta trust that I have good reasons and that’s that. Got it?”

“...Got it,” Trace mumbled reluctantly. He was too tired and confused to really argue anymore.

“Great. I’ll let you get your REM now, but there’s instructions in the mail.” The office started to fade away into blackness. Mist stepped off the desk as it disappeared behind her and smirked at the earth pony. “Goodnight, Trace~.”

Those golden eyes and that toothy smile were the last things Trace saw before the dream faded and became something else.

Outside Trace’s dream-bubble, in the greater collective limbo between dream and reality, Mist dropped her trademark smirk and groaned.

“Goddesses, was I really that stubborn…?” she muttered to herself, her voice echoing in the swirling abyss. As she gently floated away, she rubbed the side of her head and realized, “No, I would’ve been five times worse. But she had two years, not three weeks…!”

Mist Melody shook her head in disbelief. “Luna… if there’s anything left to take back at this point, I take it all back. This is going to be harder than I thought.”