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 of 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 dads 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 my 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.

Anyway, that particular time, my mom moved my bed and found the bra under the bed. And she went ballistic, you have to understand my mom is a very traditional Indian woman, she believes that sex is for after marriage (I still haven’t had the bird and the bees talk, in fact that particular biology class in year 7 came as quite the shock), she believed that girlfriends were to be introduced to you by your mom 6 months before the engagement and the marriage ceremony conducted a year later. So when she found that lacy purple thing she naturally assumed the worst and I was going to be lucky if I was able to walk after that beating. I had to barricade myself in the bathroom and explain to my mom that I went to a grammar school, and up until this past year was an all-boys school and only had 20 girls in my year group compared to a 120 boys, and a slightly overweight, geeky, introverted broke Indian guy had no chance of ever getting a girlfriend. Also my school was an hour away in a much more affluent area, and that I would never bring a girl to this part of town (this actually didn’t help much). I think the bit that finally got her to calm down and realise my innocence was my dad (who didn’t actually care if I had a girlfriend) pointing out that I got home AFTER my mom gets home from her school and there was no way I managed to sneak a girl into the house without her noticing. So I didn’t catch a beating for the bra, which got blamed on the neighbour’s cat which sometimes liked to sleep in my room. I did however catch a beating for barricading myself in the only bathroom in our house. Sometimes you can’t escape that beating.

I did learn my lesson though and I was much more careful in controlling my power. Around the same time the whole world went through a zombie fad, and things like “prepping” gained some mainstream attention. Prepping as far as I understood it was rednecks either preparing for the “inevitable” zombie apocalypse, or hiding from the “man” so that Obama couldn’t get your guns. And although I didn’t like the whys, I was interested in the hows. I watched an lot of videos on guns, knives bush craft, multitools reviews emergency wood craft and all of the various aspects of “prepping”. All of these tools did require money, which I had very little of. And this is where I got very incredibly lucky.

My parents were very strict with the internet parental protections in our house and I realised fairly quickly that one of the easiest ways to bypass the parental locks was the tor network. This worked, and it also introduced me to some of the aspects of the deep web. So I was fairly early to hear about bit coins. Around the time I started thinking about needing money bit coins were being sold on the Mt.Gox exchange for around 9.52$ a coin and bit coin mining was still an option without a dedicated farming server. I bought 20 coins with all of the savings I had, and started actively farming coins. I got stupidly lucky and managed to find a lode of 50 coins within the first two months of farming, by the time I graduated high school I had 73.453 coins.

This was also around the time when the new stupid government tripled the college tuition. So I decided to go into the workforce for a year and save up money for university. I managed to get a job at a hospital which actually let me earn a degree on a part time basis whilst working. So, I entered the workforce. This event changed my life forever. I moved out of our house, moved to a new city into the hospital dorms, working my 37.5 hrs a week at £6.75 an hour. I was a cog in the big NHS machine and I was fairly good at it. I worked a full time job whilst doing part time university degree, I made new friends, I learnt how to drink, what to drink, what I enjoyed (peated scotch) what I didn’t like (Irish whiskey). I joined a gym and started working out a bit. Lost some weight, I even managed to find time for a few casual relationships, all in all a pretty normal life as a working student in middle England.

I also continued in my prepping hobby and my blacksmithing which was fast becoming a passion, I forged myself a beautiful kukri knife at a blacksmithing course, it took me a whole week of vacation time. I spent the week forging the thing out of 1095 steel, spending 2 days just forging and spending almost as long (not included in the forging time) grinding the excess steel and hardening and tempering the blade, then I was guided through the process of making and attaching a handle and finally the blade was blunted so that it could be classified as a prop and given to me. I also saved up money to buy a Leatherman surge, I bought an emergency medical kit, and I also bought a lot of non-perishable items like salt sugar and an unholy amount of spices. All of these I items including the now sharpened kukri were stored by me in the void space (which is what I started calling my power). Over the years I had started to use my ability to store things so that I would not have to carry them. I had also been misappropriating some hospital stocks so that I wouldn’t have to buy them, nothing serious or expensive, a box of burn cream, a couple of boxes of antibiotics, some gauze, minor things to add to my emergency medical kit.

So continued my life for 2 years, by this time the price of bit coins was close to 200$ a coin, and the FBI was starting making a lot of noise, I decided that I was going to make some purchases and cash out. I decided to do something highly illegal but in hindsight it was the smartest decision I may have ever made. I decided I wanted to buy guns. Actually I decided to buy 4 guns, because I was worth it. This required patience. First I got myself a couple of fake IDs delivered to a dead drop site, which was a bin in an open park. Then using those IDs I opened a couple of PO boxes at a parcel storage site, I used one of the IDs to buy the guns one at a time interspersed with other Knick knacks and the other ID to buy the ammo(about 2000 rounds). I was constrained to hand guns by my individual package space but I also had $15000, so I spent my money on 2 glock 17s and 2 extremely illegal glock 18s with the extended mags I even managed to get myself some spare parts a pair of threaded barrels and a suppressor. After all that spending I was still left with about 8000$ which I promptly converted to pounds through Mt.Gox and used the £5700 to buy a nice laptop and £5000 in gold. Not that I didn’t trust the banks, it just made more sense to me that gold would appreciate in value faster than an ISA and I already had a secure storage vault inside my void space (I had fixed the issue of items randomly dissapearing and reappearing).

I somehow managed to do all this without being arrested or questioned by the police, Scotland Yard or MI5. And my life continued on without incident for another six months. And then it all went wrong. And my 2 years of money wasting, prepping hobby all came good. It actually started of normally, I was sent to Leicester to attend a 3 day course on new hospital protocols. This was being held at the holiday inn near DeMontford University. I got there from the train station by navigating using subway sandwich shops, I kid you not (out of the train station, turn right and use the crossing, go straight to the subway shop, turn left walk straight to the end of street passing 2 subway shops, turn left walk to the next subway shop walk further down the street till the main road and somehow make your way to the middle of the roundabout). The hotel was in the middle of the roundabout with only one crossing which was very hard to see. I arrived there after 3 hrs of travels at the appointed time of 9am to find out that the conference actually didn’t start till 11am. Luckily I had managed to convince the lovely lady who handled appropriations to book me a room at the holiday inn itself and not the godforsaken Travelodge across the road; I didn’t know if I could have managed crossing the roundabout every morning. I checked into room 308 overlooking the roman ruins across the street.

The conference went as these conferences do; a thinly veiled advertisement campaign by some former hospital management who now works for the pharma company as a sales manager, extoling the virtues of a system you have already bought and not actually explaining what is different and how to operate the new system. There were stale croissants, weird tasting coffee and dry sandwiches: a typical cheap corporate buffet lunch. So by the end of the day we were getting fed up and needed to blow off some steam. I had some high school friends who were doing their degrees at the University of Leicester, we decided to meet up and go to a couple of pubs to share in some good times. It was a good night and we parted ways around 11pm I made my way back to the hotel, again navigating by subways. I was tired, slightly tipsy and passing by the roman ruins. In almost a dazed state I walked straight to a stone that was glowing, something about that otherworldly glow was beckoning me I don’t know what made me use my powers but as soon as I used my power, the world went a blinding white and then black. I was knocked out.