[ WP ] A kid doodling in a math class accidentally creates the world 's first functional magic circle in centuries .

OK. I'll admit, it was n't what I was expecting. 
 
 When you're out of the game, you're out of the game, right? I mean, sure, you'll read the new literature, follow any new advances, but if you're not doing the research yourself, it's a comfortable distance. 
 
 It's probably not all that surprising, really. People stumble into mathematical laws from time to time; I just was n't expecting it to happen in front of me. A geometry class is not where you'd expect to have to fight a small demon. Especially when it's been summoned by a 13 year-old messing around with tangents. He was n't even a nerd. He had no real idea of what he was doing, and that was probably thanks to me. I'd like to pretend I'm a good teacher, but when you spent most of your time in University brewing your own booze and pissing around with fear demons, you do n't walk out with a detailed knowledge of how to pass on simple mathematics to disinterested teenagers. 
 
 But I digress. 
 
 I was n't actually paying that much attention, but when a red light starts shining out of a kids book onto his face, and he's looking into it as though his simultaneous equations just revealed the face of the Madonna, you figure something's up. And boy was something up. 
 
 By the time I'd gotten halfway across the classroom the ceiling was on fire and there was a spite demon climbing out from behind his trigonometry ( amazingly the kid had actually shown his work ). Dealing with the spite demon itself was n't going to be a problem - they're annoying little bastards, but a sharp rap on the skull with a meter-ruler usually does the trick. The real problem was sending it back. Killing a demon is easy enough if you have the right materials, but those materials are not typically found within a year 8 classroom. Plus, dealing with the body is a pain, so it's easier to send the thing back. Which would have been simple, if this kid had used a summoning system that had still been popular after the Hundred Years War. This one was ancient. Far older than anything I'd ever seen. 
 
 I should have been glad it was so small. There is n't much that could come through that, and the spite demon seemed willing enough to retreat back to whatever outer circle of hell that the kid had tapped into. Apparently getting poked repeatedly in the face with a plastic ruler is n't a particularly pleasant experience on either side of the dimension boundary. 
 
 Unfortunately, this was pissing him off, the ceiling was still on fire, and I had no idea how to close this bloody portal. After a while you get sick of dodging acidic demon-spit, and when bits of burning wreckage start falling around you, you tend to decide that the 31 kids that have sweetly ignored the fire bell and are staring at you as if, well, as if you're a maths teacher poking a demon in the face with a ruler under a burning ceiling will probably notice anything you do anyway, so maybe subtlety is n't the way forward. 
 
 All-purpose stuff never works. The real simple stuff. You have to start using complex spells - ones that draw from a variety of backgrounds, observe their effect on the portal, try to figure out what bit of the spell did it, and then trace it back to its roots. I'm pretty sure this counts as a `` stressful situation in the workplace'', although I very much doubt that management had included a procedure for what happens if a kids workbook suddenly shits a spite demon when they wrote the pamphlet. Unwittingly, I was about to give these kids an example of just how damn useful trial and error could be. 
 
 But a workplace situation is a workplace situation, and the pamphlet ( and common sense ) both tell you to get rid of any minor problems first. That meant extinguishing the ceiling and sending the kids out. The first was simple enough, but if a small demon had n't been enough to send these kids running, their maths teacher sure as hell was n't getting them anywhere. So I siphoned the fire off. I remembered how to do that. It's relatively simple. Then I threw the fire in the demon's face. Which is relatively stupid. It ( understandably, I suppose ) made the demon even more annoyed, and made half the ceiling fall down. This did not serve to distract my class, or the demon, who clearly decided that this world might actually be worth a shot, and tried to climb back through the hole in the trigonometry. 
 
 More poking with the ruler, and another violent exchange of spells ( me ) and spit ( the demon, and me, a little bit ), and we were back where we started, only I was reciting ancient Greek spells, assuming that if it came from after Pythagoras, it had a hope. I barely knew these spells - I preferred to work in Celtic, but the Celts never created an inter-world portal using right-angle triangles. 
 
 This did seem to have the desired effect - the portal flickered, spat, burned without damaging the workbook ( I'm quite grateful for that, all things considered ), and all the time the demon kept shrieking at me while I poked it with the ruler. Eventually I got to something that made the whole thing flicker, and managed to string together a spell that might have shut it down had the demon not been half out of it at the time. You would n't expect that to happen, would you? You'd expect the demon to be dragged back into its own world with a *whooosh*and a loud scream. But a door is a door, and a door wo n't close if someone's arse is in the way. So I grabbed a textbook from Mandy Braithwait's desk ( she's the only kid that does n't draw dicks on them ) and clocked it around the jaw. In hindsight this would have been a good starting move; closing a portal on an unconscious demon is much easier than closing a portal on an angry one. But that was by the by - I stuck the demon back through the hole and repeated the spell. 
 
 Bastard did n't work. Apparently the ancient Greeks liked to mix it up a bit. Pricks. 
 
 But I was on the right track, and managed to get the portal shut before the Headmaster rocked up asking why 8B were n't standing in a line on the all-weather pitch like everyone else. A spite demon might not have shifted them, but Mr Walsh got them moving fast enough. 
 
 I told him that the ceiling caught fire, and that it had burned out within a minute. He must have assumed that it was going to come down at one point or another. 
 
 As I left I took one last look at the workbook. 
 
 The kid understood tangents. That made my day a lot better. 
 

