This is the first entry in my new, super-secret journal. I still enjoy writing in the other journal that my friends and I share together, but I thought it might be fun to keep a separate one just for my private observations. I don't really have any big secrets to keep from my friends, but I want to experiment a little. Maybe my writing will be more honest if I know that I don't have to worry about somepony else reading it? Either way, being a princess is kind of a pain (oh good, here comes the honesty) and the crown doesn't exactly bring a lot of privacy with it. It's a heavy burden, or so my sister-in-law Princess Cadance always tells me. Just between you and me, journal, I still have a hard time believing I'm a princess at all. But Cadance says that's normal too, and there are few ponies I would trust more than my new big sister.

Anyway, the neat invention that makes this possible is a new kind of ink I've developed, and I'm quite proud of it. The ink I'm using only shows up under magical light. Of course, if you're reading this, then you probably know this already, unless you're reading from a copied text or something weird. The recipe: quinine, a bit of starch, a few simple solvents, and some additives to make the ink soak fully into the surface of the paper without bleeding through (high-quality ink, in other words). Once I figured out the quinine trick, calibrating the rest was simply trial and error. I'm pretty sure Rainbow Dash would call my magic ink "awesome" or "radical" or maybe even a made up Rainbow Dash word like "radicool" if I showed it to her, but I'll have to keep it a secret for the time being. To everypony else, this is just a tempting book with "PRIVATE: Princess Twilight Says Keep OUT!" written on the front cover, and completely blank pages on the inside. This is just too neat. I love chemistry!

Oh, one more thing. I'm going to date the book using a system that counts the number of days since my friends and I last saved Equestria from the brink of disaster, which seems to happen a lot nowadays. Hopefully that number will just keep on marching upwards, and we'll all get a well-deserved break for a while. Today's entry is marked as day zero, because a dangerous monster named Tirek was banished back to Tartarus just a few hours ago. Discord really did all the work, but Fluttershy helped bring him around, so I say we still get to count this one. Besides, technically Discord is a friend, right? Either way, it's a good thing he was here to help us. I've never seen Princess Celestia so nervous about a threat to Equestria, and she's faced down Chrysalis and King Sombra. I hate to admit it, but I'm not sure what we would have done without his assistance.