Chapter 1: the story begins at birth

Hello, let me introduce myself. My name is Emris, Emris Smith, and this is my story.

I suppose it all started when I was born, I was born near Calcutta India, in town called Krishnanagar, in the middle of a monsoon season, that according to my mom has not been surpassed. I was born to an Indian mother and an English father.

I had what I thought at the time was a normal childhood, my mother a proud strong Indian woman was the main breadwinner of the family, supporting my dad’s craziness by being a science teacher and also tutoring private students to make sure everything was paid for. My father, an undoubtedly clever man with 2 PhDs, was always restless, looking for the next thing. We moved around a lot during our childhood, him finding one job only to find another “better” one in six months or a year, we moved 5 cities by the time I was 4.

I think finally my mom had enough of never settling down, if only to give me a stable childhood, we settled down in a city on the opposite side of India, in Gujarat. We bought an apartment and settled down, he never really settled completely going from a pharmaceutical engineer to ... something I didn’t pay attention(I was 6 years old) and then to a professor of a masters level chemistry at a very respected university. Like I said; a clever man.

But like I also said he was a restless man, I think he just got bored and sometime around the time I turned 10 he decided to wander yet again. This time he went big, he decided to move back to England, and so off we went.

I now realise I haven’t actually described myself. I was a perfectly boring introvert, slightly dusky toned, average looking, and 5’11” by the time I turned 19. Slightly overweight, not really athletic. With weird and eclectic interest: I liked rock music, I was into anime, really into blacksmithing spending a lot of my time scouring YouTube learning about how to forge metals into weapons. I even spent hundreds of pounds on courses to learn the basics of blacksmithing.

I grew up pretty normal, playing cricket in with the local kids in India, then playing football when we immigrated to England. I am not ashamed to admit it, I was terrible. I mean not the worst player in any group; but towards the bottom third. I actually wasn’t that bad at cricket indoors, be it in the cricket nets or even on concrete when we played in the car parks, but put me on grass an all of my velocity and control went away. I personally blame it on the bad footwear, i didn’t own a pair of Nike’s till I was 18. My mom would rather spend the money on paying down the mortgage faster; I wish I had her wisdom.

I think I was 17 the first time I noticed my ability, I mean I might have noticed earlier that I HAD FUCKING SUPERPOWERS if it was something obvious like super strength, speed the ability to fly; but no, sadly my ability was much too subtle for a teenager to notice. I had the MASSIVE, TERRIFYING, AMAZING POWER OF making small objects disappear.

Seriously, I made small objects disappear.

I mean I was (and still am) extremely messy, so how could I have been expected figure out that I had “disappeared” the right half of my favourite pair of socks, or a pair of cheap poundland headphones or even my old mp3 player (no, my mother would not buy me an iPod, this was I think some no name 32gb mp3 player that was powered by AA batteries, that I saved up the money for and bought from Argos). Things like that go missing all the time and a messy teenager like me can’t really be blamed for not figuring it out, can I? Plus who reading this hasn’t misplaced something small like their keys or phone or their glasses. See this is the reason it took me so long to find that I had an “ability”, my power was devious. Sometimes, my powers would make the missing things reappear nearby, so to me it just seemed like I had misplaced my keys or phone and I found them again after an half hour of desperate searching.

I realised I had an “ability” when I lost my wallet on a student university trip to Nottingham university, it was a weekend long stay/course to give students an experience of what life in university would be like, to give us an experience living in dorms away from our parents, without supervision. There were lectures, tours and meetings with professors and some of the older students. There were also parties, drinking (a lot of us were already 18) and whatever follows partying and drinking. Which is a polite way to say; that my wallet wasn’t the only thing I lost that weekend. I wouldn’t have even cared that much that I lost my wallet (there was maybe £5 inside) if it were not for the fact that my dad had loaned me his NatWest debit card in case of an emergency. He didn’t actually give me his pin number which made the card useless, but it’s the thought that counts. But there I was on an away trip and I had “lost” my dad’s debit card. After what must have been 6 hours of searching by me and about 5 of my schoolmates that were also on the trip with me, we called it as a lost cause. I did the dreaded phone call to my parents, there was screaming shouting and promises made of a royal ass whooping, and then my dad was put on the phone. He chewed me out for what felt at the time for at least a half hour and threatened horrible things if any of his money went missing. The card was cancelled and obviously none of the money was spent. I returned home the next day, took my whooping like a wuss and continued on. Also a key point, my mom went through my bags herself to search for the missing wallet and I caught another whooping because some of clothes smelt of alcohol. So two weeks later when I magically found my wallet in my back pocket I was surprised, and I caught another whooping for making my parents cancel the card.

So if you are keeping count, my power has so far made me lose a bunch of stuff, made me late to school a bunch of times because I couldn’t find my keys and made me catch at least 3 whoopings. What a great ability.

But that event did make me confused and cautious, I started noticing more and more of my little items disappearing and reappearing. I actually thought I might be being haunted or losing my mind or something. It took me about a month to realise I was the one causing the items to disappear, and a further 4 months to gain some semblance of control. I told no one and didn’t even attempt to look up my powers on a computer; I had seen enough movies to be more than a little paranoid. The range of my powers seemed weird: I could only store objects smaller about 1cubic foot in size but the internal space on the other side seemed infinite, and the concept of time didn’t seem to apply. I found that out when I secretly stored some of my dad’s awful failed chicken curry experiment so that I didn’t have to eat it. Then, when I threw out the curry on my way to school the next morning, to my surprise it was still steaming hot.

I think my paranoia may have saved me. No not from some secret government organisation, I don’t know if they exist, they’re a SECRET. No it saved me from myself, I realised really fast that my power would have many criminal applications. Could you imagine how easy it would have been for me to become an international super mega amazing jewel thief, I wouldn’t even need to be in the same room as the object to steal it, as long as it was within 10ft of me I could make the object disappear. Two things stopped me from the criminal path:

No1. My paranoia told me that being a thief in the UK, the CCTV camera capitol of the world wasn’t a particularly smart idea, at some point someone was going to notice “the fatman” (my imagined Interpol codename) in multiple the CCTV footages of the various jewel heists. And ask some pointed questions.

No2. And this is how you know I actually thought about it. I was a lower middle class, grammar school boy, from the suburbs. I didn’t know anyone who could actually fence the jewels; I didn’t actually know any criminals, not even the local weed dealers. So I didn’t know what I was going to do after I got the jewels, I didn’t think cash4gold was going to accept stolen jewellery without reporting me.

This didn’t mean I never stole anything, quite the opposite actually. I didn’t actually have full conscious control of my powers, even after I realised I had powers, it still continued to disappear all manner of things from around me and occasionally reappear them in and around my room. Over the six months since I realised my powers I found many things in my room that weren’t mine. A lot of pens (I never had to buy a single pen since I came to England, in hindsight that should have been a clue), used cutlery (ewww), keys, an old French 2 franc coin(WTF? They weren’t valid since before I moved to England), two bike pumps (I didn’t own a bike), a football, a wallet (which I turned in to the school lost and found) and the thing that had me the most confused in terms of the actual how and also the thing that got me into the most trouble, a size 28 B bra(dark purple and lacy, you perverts).

Actually it wasn’t found by me, which is why it was trouble. It was found by my mom on the tri annual “your room is too messy and I am going to clean and reorganise it according to my own system”. This happened to me thrice a year, usually during my mom’s school term breaks: I would go out to meet my friends and go play football or go to the movies, and return to my room completely different than that morning, including my bed and book shelves in a different location of the room and all my books arranged uselessly according to size rather than my by subject matter and frequency of use.