It had to happen eventually.
...actually, no. No, it really didn't.
Set immediately after the events of Boast Busters, Trixie finds herself in a quandary when she realises that she has left her purse behind in Ponyville. She faces a humiliating walk back into town to pick up her money.
Before she can turn back, however, she meets a magical, sentient pine cone... sigh. Okay. Here's a proposition.
If you can make it to the end of this story without going "what" even once, you win a free internet.

Equestria is growing, and magical savant Twilight Sparkle is disgusted by the crime and corruption this change has brought. Her life is changed forever when she discovers the Death Note, a notebook with inexplicable and deadly powers. She uses this book to pass judgement on those she deems unworthy of life, aiming to create a perfect world free of crime. But when the two Princesses put their best pony on the case, a mysterious detective known only as L, a psychological game of cat and mouse erupts between the two.
Comments contain spoilers. Artwork by blu-red, opening by Anon3mous. Now with its own TV Tropes page.

Monster attacks. Crime. Illegal hallucinogens made from electric fruit.

They say things didn't use to be like this. They say things were different, before Luna came back 60 years ago, but Detective Hard "Hardy" Boiled of the Detrot Police Department has never known any world other than that demarcated by the seedy streets of his beloved decaying metropolis; a world in which the coroners sing and dance, surveillance bugs have personality disorders, and the Chief of Police is a scarier entity than most of the eldritch things the city attracts.

The grey unicorn who turned up dead outside the posh High Step Hotel seemed like just another case, but her missing horn is the pointy tip of a very large and nasty iceberg. It's up to Hardy and his friends - a rejected monster hunter, a psychic cab driver, and an underground antiques heir - to find out what’s going on in an investigation that promises to stick more than a cupcake into the very eye of Detrot.

Especially if Hardy has anything to say about it.

By Popular Demand, there is now a Patreon

Additional editing by coandco Sig_Awesome, Hinds, Clint, and Raccoon!
Featured on EQD - 5 Stars!
Cover art by MisterMech (http://mistermech.deviantart.com/)
Now with TVTropes page here!

Twilight composes a letter to the Princess about a terrible Hearth's Warming gift.

Featured on Equestria Daily, 23 June 2012.

In the wake of the events of "Infernal Machines" and the Nightmare's most pathetic assault on Ponyville yet, Applejack is thrown into an existential crisis, despite her not knowing what the word "existential" means. So when a stranger named Stranger arrives in town, teaching a new way of coupling talent to power using complex machinery, she is quickly suckered in, along with everypony else. Now, it falls to the Most Dependable of Ponies to bring the resulting ruckus down to earth, but can even Applejack's legendary pragmatism stand up to the brain-fizzing horror that is... CONTRAPTIONOLOGY?

Now with a Spanish translation by Spaniard Kiwi!